Nine people have been killed and thousands have been seriously injured after pagers exploded in Lebanon, the country’s health minister has said.
Firas Abiad said 200 of the 2,750 wounded were in a critical condition.
In a statement, Hezbollah said three people had died in the explosions, including two fighters and one girl.
Lebanese information minister Ziad Makary laid the blame directly on “Israeli aggression”, while Hezbollah has promised to retaliate insisting Israel would receive “its fair punishment” for the blasts.
The Israeli military, which has been engaged in cross-border fighting with Hezbollah since the start of the Gaza war, has refused to respond to questions about the detonations.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters news agency the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group has faced in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Image: An ambulance arrives at the American University of Beirut Medical Center amid a large number of injured people after pagers began exploding. Pic: Reuters
Image: People gather outside a hospital in Beirut to check on the injured. Pic: Reuters
According to AP, a Hezbollah official said that at least 150 people, including members of the group, were wounded in different parts of Lebanon when the devices exploded.
Other reports have cited varying figures of how many are injured.
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Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also said to have been injured by the explosion of a pager according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.
How could the pagers explode?
There has been widespread speculation about what caused the pagers to explode. Experts broadly agree that the blasts do not look like a typical lithium battery fire.
Keren Elazari, a hacker and security researcher at Tel Aviv University, told Sky News: “There is no remote hacking capability that could generate that kind of kinetic explosion… some sort of a physical explosive component was probably part of the equation.”
Image: Huge crowds gather outside a hospital in Beirut amid the explosions – it isn’t yet clear how many people were injured. Pic: Reuters
Image: Police officers inspect a car where a pager exploded in Beirut.
Pic: AP
What is Hezbollah?
Hezbollah is one of the most heavily armed non-state groups in the world and forms part of the government in Lebanon, with dozens of MPs in parliament.
It is deemed a terrorist organisation by many, including some Western governments, and has played a significant role in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, exchanging fire with Israel since last October in parallel with the war.
A Hezbollah official told AP that the pagers which exploded had apparently been deployed after the group’s leader ordered its members to stop using mobile phones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence.
Why are Hezbollah using pagers?
Many will ask why Hezbollah was using pagers in 2024.
The old-fashioned communication method was seemingly favoured by the group specifically for the fact it was not the latest technology.
Pagers were popular from the late 1980s to the 1990s and could display either a numeric or brief written message.
However, they were eventually replaced by affordable mobile phones.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry mobile phones because Israel could use them to track their movements.
On the other hand, pagers, in theory, pose no such problem.
Sky News Middle East correspondent Alistair Bunkall adds: “Hezbollah has been very cautious with its communications, aware that mobile phone conversations can be easily hacked and traced – pagers would have considered a lo-fi alternative and harder to infiltrate.”
Using older technologies has been a strategy of non-state groups to avoid electronic communication being intercepted by their more technologically advanced adversaries, J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University specialising in military armament, says.
He continued: “My suspicion is that pagers are part of the same strategy – by virtue of being an older technology, they’re harder to access because there are no satellites and radars in the same way as with more advanced forms of communication.
“What Israel has done here is send a very clear signal that they do have the ability to disrupt or access older forms of technology that are being used precisely to circumvent advanced cyber capabilities.”
A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital Beirut amid widespread panic.
They also reported that, at Mt Lebanon hospital, motorcycles raced to the emergency room carrying people with severely injured and bloodied hands.
Residents said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
Image: Pic: Reuters
Image: An ambulance pictured in Sidon, Lebanon, amid the incident. Pic: Reuters
Large crowds were pictured outside hospitals as ambulances transported the injured.
Groups of people huddled at the entrance of buildings to check on the well-being of those they knew who may have been wounded, the Reuters journalist said.
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A large-scale Russian attack through the night into Sunday injured at least 11 in Kyiv and killed three people in towns surrounding the capital.
There were attacks elsewhere as well, including drone strikes in Mykolaiv, where a residential building was hit.
Image: An apartment building destroyed after a Russian attack in Mykolaiv. Pic: State Emergency Service of Ukraine
‘Massive’ attack
In Kyiv, the city’s administration warned “the night will be difficult”, as people were urged to remain in shelters.
The city’s mayor Vitaliy Klitschko described it as a “massive” attack.
He said: “Explosions in the city. Air defence forces are working. The capital is under attack by enemy UAVs. Do not neglect your safety! Stay in shelters!”
It came after at least 15 people were injured in attacks the night prior.
Russia claimed it also faced a Ukrainian drone attack on Sunday, and that it intercepted and destroyed around 100 of them near Moscow and across Russia’s central and southern regions.
Image: A municipality worker cleans up after a Russian drone strike on Kyiv. Pic: Reuters
Russia ‘dragging out the war’
Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine continued a prisoner exchange, marking a rare moment of cooperation in the war.
Amid the most recent attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated his calls for sanctions on Russia.
Russia “fills each day with horror and murder” and is “simply dragging out the war”, he said.
Image: A resident looks at an apartment building that was damaged in a Russian drone strike. Pic: Reuters
“All of this demands a response – a strong response from the United States, from Europe, and from everyone in the world who wants this war to end,” Mr Zelenskyy added.
Every day “gives new grounds for sanctions against Russia”, he said, and each day without pressure proves the “war will continue”.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is ready for “any form of diplomacy that delivers real results”.
Nine of a doctor’s 10 children have been killed in an Israeli missile strike on their home in Gaza, which also left her surviving son badly injured and her husband in a critical condition.
Warning: This article contains details of child deaths
Alaa Al Najjar, a paediatrician at Al Tahrir Clinic in the Nasser Medical Complex, was at work during the attack on her home, south of the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, on Friday.
Graphic footage shared by the Hamas-run Palestinian Civil Defence shows the bodies of at least seven small children being pulled from the rubble.
Rescuers can be seen battling fires and searching through a collapsed building, shouting out when they locate a body, before bringing the children out one by one and wrapping their remains in body bags.
In the footage, Dr Al Najjar’s husband, Hamdi Al Najjar, who is also a doctor, is put on to a stretcher and then carried to an ambulance.
The oldest of their children was only 12 years old, according to Dr Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry, which is run by Hamas.
Image: Nine children were killed in the strike. Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
“This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,” he wrote in a social media post.
“In Gaza, it is not only healthcare workers who are targeted – Israel’s aggression goes further, wiping out entire families.”
Image: Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
British doctors describe ‘horrific’ and ‘unimaginable’ attack
Two British doctors working at Nasser Hospital described the attack as “horrific” and “unimaginable” for Dr Al Najjar.
Speaking in a video diary on Friday night, Dr Graeme Groom said his last patient of the day was Dr Al Najjar’s 11-year-old son, who was badly injured and “seemed much younger as we lifted him on to the operating table”.
Image: Hamdi Al Najjar, Dr Al Najjar’s husband who is also a doctor, was taken to hospital. Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
The strike “may or may not have been aimed at his father”, Dr Groom said, adding that the man had been left “very badly injured”.
Dr Victoria Rose said the family “lived opposite a petrol station, so I don’t know whether the bomb set off some massive fire”.
Image: Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
‘No political or military connections’
Dr Groom added: “It is unimaginable for that poor woman, both of them are doctors here.
“The father was a physician at Nasser Hospital. He had no political and no military connections. He doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media, and yet his poor wife is the only uninjured one, who has the prospect of losing her husband.”
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2:21
Nineteen of Gaza’s hospitals remain operational, all of them are overwhelmed with the number of patients and a lack of supplies
He said it was “a particularly sad day”, while Dr Rose added: “That is life in Gaza. That is the way it goes in Gaza.”
Sky News has approached the Israeli Defence Forces for comment.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza began when the militant group stormed across the border into Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 251 others.
Israel’s military response has flattened large areas of Gaza and killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count.
The head of the UN has said Israel has only authorised for Gaza what amounts to a “teaspoon” of aid after at least 60 people died in overnight airstrikes.
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said on Friday the supplies approved so far “amounts to a teaspoon of aid when a flood of assistance is required,” adding “the needs are massive and the obstacles are staggering”.
He warned that more people will die unless there is “rapid, reliable, safe and sustained aid access”.
Image: A woman at the site of an Israeli strike in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
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1:44
Gaza: ‘Loads of children with huge burns’
Israel says around 300 aid trucks have been allowed through since it lifted an 11-week blockade on Monday, but according to Mr Guterres, only about a third have been transported to warehouses within Gaza due to insecurity.
The IDF said 107 vehicles carrying flour, food, medical equipment and drugs were allowed through on Thursday.
Many of Gaza’s two million residents are at high risk of famine, experts have warned.
Meanwhile, at least 60 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes across Gaza overnight.
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Ten people died in the southern city of Khan Younis, and deaths were also reported in the central town of Deir al-Balah and the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north, according to the Nasser, Al-Aqsa and Al-Ahli hospitals where the bodies were brought.
Image: A body is carried out of rubble after an Israeli strike in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
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3:08
‘Almost everyone depends on aid’ in Gaza
The latest strikes came a day after two Israeli embassy workers were killed in Washington.
The suspect, named as 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, Illinois, told police he “did it for Gaza”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of fuelling antisemitism following the shootings.
Mr Netanyahu also accused Sir Keir, Mr Macron and Mr Carney of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”.
Image: Palestinians search for casualties in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
But UK government minister Luke Pollard told Sky News on Friday morning he “doesn’t recognise” Mr Netanyahu’s accusation.
Earlier this week, Mr Netanyahu said he was recalling negotiators from the Qatari capital, Doha, after a week of ceasefire talks failed to bring results. A working team will remain.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251 others.
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The militants are still holding 58 captives, around a third of whom are believed to be alive, after most of the rest were returned in ceasefire agreements or other deals.
Israel’s offensive, which has destroyed large swaths of Gaza, has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.