Israel Blamed as Pager Explosions in Lebanon Kill 12 & Injure 2,800; Hezbollah Vows to Respond

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

In Lebanon, at least 12 people were killed, over 2,800 injured Tuesday when electronic pagers used by members of Hezbollah exploded at the same time. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. Israel is widely believed to be behind the attack. Hezbollah vowed to retaliate against Israel, as fears grow of a broader regional war.

According to a report by Reuters, Israel’s Mossad spy agency had managed to plant explosive material in a batch of pagers bought in recent months by Hezbollah. The pagers were sold under the name of the Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo, but the company said the pagers were actually made by a firm in Budapest that had a license to use the Gold Apollo name.

Victims of the attack included a 10-year-old girl who died when her father’s pager exploded. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also injured by an exploding pager. The New York Times reports he lost an eye in the blast.

The nature of the simultaneous attack shocked many in Lebanon.

LEBANESE MAN: (translated) What happened yesterday shocked us. It was unimaginable. No one could have thought that pagers could explode like that. The scene was shocking, how people were torn apart right in front of you.

AMY GOODMAN: Hezbollah relied on pagers in part to avoid Israel’s surveillance of other communication networks, like cellphones. Lebanese lawmaker Tony Frangieh Jr. condemned the attack as an act of terrorism.

TONY FRANGIEH JR.: (translated) Catastrophic repercussions for the crisis today, but this, as I have previously explained with several stations, is terrorism being practiced against Lebanon. And we — and, I believe, the majority of the Lebanese people — do not submit to the language of terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier today, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken said the U.S. did not know about nor was involved in what he called, quote, “these incidents.” Blinken made the comments in Cairo, Egypt, where he held a joint news conference with the Egyptian foreign minister and met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Axios reports Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin shortly before the operation began.

We go now to Beirut, Lebanon, where we’re joined by independent Lebanese journalist Mohamad Kleit.

Thanks so much for being with us. Mohamad, can you describe the scene yesterday at 3:30?

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Thank you very much for having me.

We’re still in a sort of state of shock of what happened. We didn’t comprehend what was going on until later hours at night. What happened at 3:30 exactly, certain sounds of small explosions were happening in the streets of the southern suburbs specifically, people hearing — yelling at the street. People were in a state of shock. Some of them who were not targeted by this terrorist attack were in a state of — they were frozen in the streets, not knowing what was going on. It was very hard to comprehend, to make sense of what was happening.

Then, later on, people started helping the people who were injured, where these pagers exploded on their waists or even their hands or in front of their faces, taking them to hospitals, because they were falling down on the street by the thousands. As the minister of health has counted, around 1,850 persons were injured in the southern suburbs alone, or in Beirut in general. There were around 2,000 persons who were admitted to hospitals, around 450 persons who were critically injured in the faces and the eyes, while on the street people until now are still making sense of what was happening. Even until late at night, people were still on the streets still trying to get people who were injured from their houses, from the cafes, from the supermarkets, from all the civilian buildings where these pagers have exploded, trying to admit them to hospitals, trying to donate blood for those who have lost it.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number of people killed and wounded and the people who were killed — we just reported on an 8-year-old girl — can you go more into this, Mohamad?

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Yes. So far, there have been 13 persons who were killed, 10 of them who are direct personnels of Hezbollah, whether they be affiliated with Hezbollah or they might be contractors, as well, because from what — and there are also three other civilians, a mother and the little girl that you talked about, who was — I think she’s 9 years old, and there’s also a young boy who’s 11 years old who passed away late at night. From what I know, that these pagers are used by Hezbollah, basically by the people who are medics, who work in logistics, not the people who work — very few of them who work in the military sector of Hezbollah use these pagers.

AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to bring a guest into the conversation who is an expert on investigating human rights abuses: Ramzi Kaiss, Human Rights Watch researcher investigating human rights abuses in Lebanon. He’s joining us from Geneva. Ramzi, thanks so much for being with us. Can you explain what you understand technically happened? And talk about it in the context of an international human rights framework.

RAMZI KAISS: Thanks, Amy. And thanks for having me.

As you noted and as Mohamad noted, yesterday there were scenes of just chaos and shock in Lebanon as thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously across the country, resulting in thousands of people being injured, according to the Ministry of Health. At least 12 people have been killed. This includes two children and aid workers. At least 2,800 people have been injured.

Now, photos and videos that we reviewed that were taken by witnesses to the attack or victims showed pagers exploding in public places such as grocery stores or supermarkets. And other videos that appear to be linked to the attack that took place, taken from emergency rooms, showed adults and children in emergency rooms with truly severe, traumatic and penetrating injuries. We saw injuries to the head, to the torso, to the limbs, with — many people had decapitated fingers, in addition to other injuries that appear to be consistent with the detonation of high explosives.

Now, we know that Hezbollah, in a statement that they issued, said that these pagers had belonged to various units and institutions within Hezbollah. They blame the Israeli government. And we know from the various media reports that have come out, you know, citing Israeli — former Israeli officials and U.S. officials saying that Israel is responsible for the attack. But the Israeli military has not commented as of yet, at least according to my knowledge.

But, look, certainly, there needs to be a full and prompt investigation into how the attack unfolded, that should be conducted. But what we know, from the perspective of international humanitarian law, on the way in which this attack took place, the law of armed conflict is clear. It prohibits the use of booby traps or other apparently harmless portable devices that civilians could be attracted to or that civilians use, precisely in order to avoid the harm that we saw unfold in Beirut yesterday with the devastating scenes of thousands of people being rushed to the hospital at the same time, including children, including civilians. When an explosive device is used or implanted in something such as a pager, where this device, its location cannot be reliably determined, where the means of attack or the method in which the attack takes place cannot differentiate between civilians or combatants, it cannot be directed at a specific military target, and which would strike military targets and civilians alike without distinguishing between them, this is an unlawfully indiscriminate attack, and it’s unlawful under the laws of war.

And there needs to be accountability for this violation and for other violations, because, as we’ve seen, there has been continued impunity for violations of the laws of war in Lebanon. Human Rights Watch has documented apparently deliberate attacks on civilians, on journalists, indiscriminate attacks on civilians, widespread use of white phosphorus, including on populated areas, and the use of U.S. weapons unlawfully against aid workers. And without accountability for such violations, they will continue with impunity. We’ve previously on various countries, such as the U.S. and other countries, to suspend arms sales and military assistance to Israel in light of the fact that they could be used unlawfully in violations of IHL, as we are seeing unfold in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted following the attacks, quote, “What Israel has just done is, via any method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.” Ramzi, your response?

RAMZI KAISS: Yeah. I mean, in the videos that we reviewed, you could clearly see these devices go off in supermarkets, where civilians were nearby, children were nearby, and the attacks happened at the same time. And so, when you use explosive devices that are not able to distinguish between — or, specifically target a military object, then they’re indiscriminate and could cause harm to civilians, as well as the military target. That would amount to an indiscriminate attack, and that is unlawful under the laws of war and should be investigated as a violation of IHL. And for those reasons, there needs to be not just an investigation, but accountability for such violations, or we will continue to see violations unfold with impunity.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned about the risk of a broader regional war.

JOSEP BORRELL: I was in Lebanon before coming to Emirates. I was visiting the United Nation troops in the border. When I came there, the level of danger was increasing, and I see the troops going to their barracks. Certainly, there is a possibility of the war spilling over not only to Lebanon, but also it’s already being important fire in the Red Sea, where we, the European Union, has deployed a navy mission in order to protect the freedom of navigation. The risk of a spillover is not from yesterday; it’s from the beginning. And we have to put all our efforts in order to try to avoid the regionalization of the war in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Josep Borrell, EU chief, the European Union. Rami Khouri is also with us, in Boston, Palestinian American journalist, senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. Rami, you have repeatedly said you do not believe what was happening in Gaza would lead to a broader regional war. What are your thoughts today on what happened yesterday and where this is all headed?

RAMI KHOURI: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

You know, there are so many dimensions to this. And most of the discussion that we’re all involved in is based on speculation and assumptions. We have to be really careful to wait ’til we get verifiable facts, and then we can have a better idea.

But for the moment, I think I would say the following. I still believe that Hezbollah, Israel, Iran, Hamas and others want to avoid a all-out, you know, free-for-all war between people in the region, which would probably include the U.S. if Iran gets involved. We saw a couple months ago that Israel cannot defend itself by itself. It needs Arab support. It needs big-time American support on the spot. And it needs significant aid of money and weapons and other things. So, I still believe an all-out regional war is going to be avoided, because everybody realizes it wouldn’t solve anything. It would just create massive suffering and more openings for terror groups and armed nonstate actors, as well, etc. That’s what happens when you have chaos.

So, but what we do have is a regional low-intensity conflict going on. It’s been going on for about a year or so. And Hezbollah and Israel are the key points of this, but Hamas is involved. The Ansar Allah, the Houthis, in Yemen are involved, and others. Iran indirectly is involved. And the U.S. indirectly, through Israel, is involved.

What the Israeli attack using the pagers did is completely throw out the rulebook on two things. One, as the previous guest said, the rules of war are irrelevant. They’ve always been irrelevant to Israel and the Zionist movements before the creation of Israel. They’ve done whatever they needed to do, they say, to protect themselves. The world says there’s rules of wars to deal with that, but the Israelis have always ignored it. But they’ve also now thrown out the rules of engagement that Hezbollah and Israel have applied really since 2006, the last big war between them. I was in Beirut for that, and I experienced it, and I know the feeling that’s prevalent all over Lebanon now. It’s something I’ve experienced several times. And that was the point of what the Israelis wanted to do. They wanted to traumatize and terrorize the entire civilian population. They wanted to shock the Hezbollah institutions. And they wanted to basically destabilize the country to the point where if the Israelis wanted to go into South Lebanon in a big way, they would lay the groundwork for that.

But at the same time, what we, I think, have to keep remembering, in the last three, four months, we’ve had Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel and the Ansar Allah in Yemen, with their supersonic missile or whatever it’s called, the big-time missile that went right into Israel undetected from Yemen — they’ve all been broadcasting, showcasing their technical capabilities — in other words, sending a message to the other that we want to avoid a full war, because we have huge capabilities that we haven’t used yet, and this is something you all want to avoid. Israel just did its part in that drama, showing the capabilities that it has.

The thing that is fascinating to me and important and still unclear is that Israel had to prepare for this months and months ahead of time. And we’ll get more details on that soon. But this suggests that this kind of an operation was probably the prelude to a big land and air attack, I’m assuming, because they wouldn’t just do this by itself and drop it probably. But we’ll see. We don’t know the details.

But the Israelis have talked about Hezbollah for several years as their main threat, their main concern in the region. Hamas and others are secondary. They see Hezbollah both as a threat because of its power and its disruption in the north of Israel and because of its very direct links with Iran. And they’ve talked about trying to break it up, destroy it, push it back from the border. They keep coming up with all kinds of different ideas, none of which are clear, and almost none of which are within its capabilities.

So, you know, there are so many unknown factors. But we can say that all sides have tremendous capabilities, technological and other. They’re prepared to use them. They’re prepared to risk an all-out war in the region, which they would try to contain in the region without getting, say, the U.S. and Iran involved. And we don’t know if this is all — if the Israelis did this mainly to put pressure on the Lebanese and Hezbollah to accept the Israeli terms for the new terms of engagement, which is to push Hezbollah back from the Lebanon-Israel border about 10 miles or so. And it’s possible that this is just a short-term measure that Israel is trying to achieve. So, I think we have to take all of these things into consideration.

The last point I make is, nothing that happened yesterday and today or in the last few months is really new, but the scale of it is much bigger than anything that’s happened before. Israel and Hezbollah and others have used technology to kill each other and terrorize each other for decades. Terrorizing civilians is a stable Israeli policy for many years. And none of it is really new, but the scale of it now is what’s kind of scary. And because the Israel-U.S. combination is now actively exchanging fire with five or six parties all around the Middle East and facing a huge global swell of support for a ceasefire in Gaza and for a Palestinian state, serious political pressures that might even influence the American presidential election outcome possibly in the swing states, these are signs that the scale of the actions and the scale of the consequences are far higher than ever before.

And if you take a — you say, “Why is this?” I would say the one main reason — there are many, but the one main reason is that the U.S. and the Western world has allowed the right-wing Israeli governments of the last 15, 20 years to do anything they want, in terms of settlements, imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, killing people, now a plausible genocide. Israel can do anything it wants, kill as many people, ignore as many laws, terrorize as many people as it wants, dehumanize as many people as it wants. It will suffer no consequences. This is something quite extraordinary. And the world has to somehow come to grips with this.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Beirut for a moment. Victims of Israel’s pager attack included — I guess she’s 10 years old — a little girl named Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, killed when her father’s pager exploded. And now also confirmed, a young boy named Bilal Kanj has not survived his injuries after the Israeli pager attack in Lebanon. He becomes the second child to be killed. And I wanted to go back to the journalist Mohamad Kleit to ask about how widespread these pagers are in Lebanon and about the use of pagers specifically to avoid Israel’s surveillance of, specifically, cellphones.

MOHAMAD KLEIT: OK. So, there are two catches in this. The first part is that this batch, this new batch, that Hezbollah has ordered for these pagers, as you have mentioned before, that it’s a Taiwanese-made pager, but they got it from a Bulgarian (sic) company that uses the same name of the Taiwanese company or has the rights to use the name. As the investigations, journalistic investigations, have shown, Israel has intercepted this cargo of around 4,000 to 5,000 pagers, and they have tampered with it and detonated them, alongside placing eavesdropping devices inside of them.

And as Dr. Khouri has mentioned, that it was a weapon that they wanted to use during a full-on-scale attack or maybe a land attack on Lebanon, but, as we have seen two days ago, this plot was exposed by certain technicians in Hezbollah. And, you know, my personal sources have said that because this plot was exposed and they were working on getting rid of them and doing an investigation that they were doing on these pagers, that’s why Israel has detonated these pagers in a sudden way and caused this chain attack on people, on civilians and military personnel of Hezbollah. And about the —

AMY GOODMAN: Mohamad, just a quick correction.

MOHAMAD KLEIT: — second catch, why do they — 

AMY GOODMAN: Just a quick correction on —

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: It was a Budapest-based — it was a Hungary-based company. I’m looking at the Reuters report. “The model of pagers used in” —

MOHAMAD KLEIT: I’m sorry. Yeah, Hungary. I said Bulgaria. Yeah, sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: — “detonations in Lebanon were made by Budapest-based BAC Consulting,” —

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the “Taiwanese pager firm Gold Apollo said on Wednesday, adding it had only licensed out its brand to the company and was not involved in the production of the devices.” But keep going, Mohamad.

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Yes. I’m sorry. I think I said Bulgarian, not Budapest.

Yeah. And as for the second part, why do they still use the pagers? Hezbollah General-Secretary Hassan Nasrallah has said before that there’s a huge danger in using cellphones, smartphones, that are connected to the Wi-Fi and to global internet, on the safety of the combatants of Hezbollah in the south, as well as the civilian usage of these phones when they are filming in videos the locations of where the missiles and the rockets are coming out in the fields and in the valleys and so on, because this is — when it’s being spread on social media or being distributed and shared on WhatsApp or other applications, this is giving intelligence information for the Israelis, who are later on bombing these locations of the videos that are being widespread. So there were internal orders by Hezbollah to not use smartphones, to try to disconnect them, when possible, from the internet and from the Wi-Fi connections. So they have relied on this new batch of pagers that they had. But, as I’ve mentioned, that they were tampered with and — intercepted and tampered with by the Israeli Mossad. And we saw what happened yesterday.

AMY GOODMAN: And are people still going to hospitals to give blood?

MOHAMAD KLEIT: And I wanted to also — and I just wanted to add something for what Mr. Kaiss has said concerning that Israel is using booby traps, which are illegal based on international law. During the ’90s, I still remember, when we used to go to the south during the Israeli occupation of the southern Lebanon, Israel used to drop baby toys that had booby traps, and they have small explosive devices. They used to drop them from military helicopters in the valleys, on the streets of the villages, where little kids used to pick them up, and then they would explode. That’s why we have seen many people from my generation, from the ’90s, they are either arms are amputated or they are missing a leg, because of this illegal usage or illegal forms of warfare.

AMY GOODMAN: And the hospital, the issue of the hospitals and people going to give blood? Again, thousands and thousands of people have been injured, nearly 3,000, it’s believed, at this point, Mohamad.

MOHAMAD KLEIT: Yes. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, that these pagers are used by medical personnel or logistics, some of the military personnel of Hezbollah. I know some of the persons that I talked to yesterday, that they were at a clinic, and two of the doctors had these pagers, and they blew up on their waist. One of them had his fingers amputated. The other had minor injuries.

And we’ve seen this huge influx of people trying to donate blood, because, as the Ministry of Health has said, there are roughly 2,800 persons who were injured, as I’ve mentioned, as well, 1,850 only in Beirut. The huge state of chaos, of medical chaos that we have seen in the city, particularly, is out of this world. It’s sort of like something from a sci-fi movie. But we have seen this huge state of cohesion and support from Lebanese, in general, that they have went from — that they came from different parts of the country, from far sides of the country, just to donate blood. Doctors and nurses came from bordering areas to the city and to Baalbek in the east and also to Nabatieh and Tyre in the south, to support the hospitals, because they had a shortage of medical staff, and also to donate blood for the people who were injured, creating these blood banks in the streets, as we have — also are seeing today, because it’s a huge case of chaos, and, sadly, we don’t have the proper medical infrastructure because of the crises that we have been through since 2019, and there is no proper plan of emergency to be implemented by the government, so people are trying to organize themselves in order to ease the crisis that we are in right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mohamad Kleit, I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from Beirut, Lebanon, Lebanese journalist. Ramzi Kaiss, a Human Rights Watch researcher, thank you, as well, for joining us from Geneva, investigating human rights abuses in Lebanon, and Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist, speaking to us from Boston, senior public policy fellow at American University of Beirut. Of course, we’ll continue to follow this story.

Coming up, ProPublica has revealed at least two Black women died in Georgia after they could not access legal abortion and timely medical care. Vice President Harris brought up their stories while addressing the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday. We’ll speak with a ProPublica editor working on the story and a Georgia reproductive justice activist with SisterSong. Stay with us.