They gathered to mourn pager attack victims – then a blast tore through the crowd

They had gathered in their thousands to defy Israel and lay to rest four of their comrades, victims of the pagers that had exploded in their hands or their pockets the previous day. Then it happened again.

As the shadows lengthened in the late afternoon on Wednesday, a single thud echoed through the crowd following one cortège through the streets of Hezbollah’s strongholds in south Beirut.

Suddenly screams drowned out the resistance songs blaring out of the sound system and the crowd scattered – except for a man in a white top and black trousers who crumpled backwards onto the ground, his hands blown off, according to witnesses.

It was just the start. Across the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, as well as in the Hezbollah-dominated Bekaa Valley 19 miles to its east, simultaneous explosions, mostly triggered by detonating handheld radios, set buildings and cars ablaze, sending smoke billowing across the skyline.

Moments before this second wave of attacks began, Dr Salah Zein-el-Dine, chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, had finally sunk back into his office chair after a sleepless night of mayhem at the hospital.

All 12 of the hospital’s operating theatres were still at full capacity as doctors performed surgery on the victims of the pager explosions, many of whom had lost fingers or their eyes.

There were still more waiting, he said, but the end was within sight for exhausted surgeons: within 24 hours things would just about be back to normal.

But within minutes, Beirut again echoed to the wail of ambulance sirens as a city, still struggling to come to terms with the barely comprehensible events of the previous day, lurched into a fresh, equally befuddling crisis.

With at least 20 dead and hundreds more wounded in Wednesday’s attacks, adding to the 12 killed and thousands injured the previous day, it was far from clear how Lebanon’s creaking health system would cope.

Before the second wave of attacks, Hezbollah men mingling in the throng of relatives and friends waiting outside the hospital had been eager to project a mixture of bravado and righteous anger towards Israel, the suspected orchestrators of both attacks.

Many were awaiting instructions on what to do next from Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who is expected to give an address to his supporters on Thursday afternoon that may signal the scope of the Iran-backed group’s planned retaliation.

“If he says go, we will go,” one of the men said. “If he says stay, we will stay.”

Yet the previous 24 hours at the hospital provided a glimpse of just how devastating the blow struck against Hezbollah had been.

Doctors spoke of victims who arrived first in a trickle and then in a flood, their fingers blown off, eyes blinded or faces scarred.

Most of the wounded were young men, Dr Zein-el-Dine said, but some were women and children.

At least two children were killed in the initial attacks, one of them a girl of about nine who brought her father his pinging pager only for it to detonate in her hands.

Some Hezbollah men admitted to their shock as they recalled what they had witnessed on the streets of southern Beirut.

“I heard a commotion and went onto the street,” one said. “There were people lying scattered on the ground, including two of my neighbours who were badly injured in their hands and hips. It was horrific.”

Though the men outside the hospital would never have admitted it, the pager attacks clearly humiliated Hezbollah, sowing consternation and uncertainty through its ranks.

Wednesday’s attacks would only have doubled the panic and the pain. Rarely, if ever, has a movement been so thoroughly and comprehensively infiltrated, and with such devastating effect, too.

That the attacks will have undermined Hezbollah’s logistical capabilities, severely complicated its ability to communicate and weakened morale is not in doubt. Whether it has shaken confidence in Nasrallah’s leadership is another matter.

So far Hezbollah’s leader has held back from unleashing the full force of the movement’s arsenal at Israel, mostly desisting even when an Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed Fuad Shukr, one of his most senior commanders, in July.

Although Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 rockets into northern Israel since the start of the Gaza conflict in September last year, this is little more than the normal thrust and parry of low-level conflict and constitutes a mere fraction of the movement’s military wherewithal.

Many analysts believe that despite the provocation, Nasrallah’s instincts will remain cautious – although some of the belligerent rhetoric coming from across Lebanon’s southern border suggests that the decision about whether to launch a major confrontation may have been taken out of his hands anyway.

On Wednesday night, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, announced the opening of “a new phase in the war” and hinted that resources and forces would be diverted from Gaza towards a new “centre of gravity” in the north.

Lebanon, scarred by decades of turbulence and whose people love and loathe Hezbollah with equal intensity, is bracing itself for the worst.