Hezbollah hand-held radios detonate across Lebanon, sources say

Firefighters put out flames at the scene of a reported device explosion in Saida in southern Lebanon on 18 September 2024. Photo: AFP

By Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily, Reuters

Hand-held radios used by Lebanese armed group Hezbollah detonated across Lebanon's south and in Beirut suburbs, further stoking tensions with Israel a day after similar explosions launched via the group's pagers.

Lebanon's health ministry said 14 people had been killed and more than 300 injured, while the death toll from Tuesday's explosions rose to 12, including two children, with nearly 3000 injured.

At least one of Wednesday's blasts took place near a funeral organised by Iran-backed Hezbollah for those killed the previous day when thousands of pagers used by the group exploded across the country and wounded many of its fighters.

A Reuters reporter in the southern suburbs of Beirut said he saw Hezbollah members frantically taking out the batteries of any walkie-talkies on them that had not exploded, tossing the parts in metal barrels around them.

Lebanon's Red Cross said on X that it was responding with 30 ambulance teams to multiple explosions in different areas, including the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

Hezbollah, which was thrown briefly into disarray by the pager attacks, said on Wednesday it had attacked Israeli artillery positions with rockets, the first strike at its arch-foe since the blasts wounded thousands of its members in Lebanon and raised the prospect of a wider Middle East war.

A man holds a walkie talkie device after he removed the battery during the funeral of persons killed when hundreds of paging devices exploded. Photo: ANWAR AMRO/AFP

Images of the exploded walkie-talkies examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labelled "ICOM" and "made in Japan."

According to its website, ICOM is a Japan-based radio communications and telephone company.

The company has said that production of several models of the ICOM hand-held radio have been discontinued, including the IC-V82, which appeared to closely match those in images from Lebanon on Wednesday and which was phased out in 2014.

There was no immediate reply from ICOM to a Reuters request for comment on Wednesday.

The hand-held radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time that the pagers were bought, said a security source.

Israel's spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of sophisticated operations on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday's detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

Israel's military has declined to comment on the blasts.

Tuesday's attack wounded many of the militant group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut.

Frontline workers described hellish scenes: victims of thousands of small explosions linked to pagers used by Hezbollah rushed into hospitals, some with organs protruding, others with missing eyes or fingers.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called for an independent investigation into the events surrounding exploding pagers.

The United Nations Security Council will meet on Friday over the pager blasts after a request from Algeria on behalf of Arab states, said Slovenia's U.N. Ambassador Samuel Zbogar, president of the 15-member council for September.

Taiwanese pager maker Gold Apollo denied that it had produced the pager devices. It said the devices were made under licence by a company called BAC, based in Hungary's capital Budapest.

Hungary on Wednesday said the devices had never been in the country and that authorities had established that BAC was a trading-intermediary company with no manufacturing or operations in Hungary.

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October, fuelling fears of a wider Middle East war that could drag in the United States and Iran.

A full-blown war with Israel could devastate Lebanon, which has lurched from one crisis to another in recent years, including a 2019 financial collapse and the 2020 Beirut port blast.

Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of pushing the Middle East to the brink of a regional war by orchestrating a dangerous escalation on many fronts.

"Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war. It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response," said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

Hezbollah, Iran's most powerful proxy in the Middle East, said in a statement it would continue to support Hamas in Gaza and Israel should await a response to the pager "massacre" which left fighters and others bloodied, hospitalised or dead.

One Hezbollah official said the detonation was the group's "biggest security breach" in its history.

The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told Reuters. It followed a series of assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders and leaders ascribed to Israel since the start of the Gaza war.

Hezbollah had turned to pagers and other low-tech communications devices in an attempt to evade Israeli surveillance of mobile phones.

- Reuters