‘Sophisticated evil’: Beirut medics and civilians horrified by pager attacks

Two beeps and a pause was the only warning Yusuf got. He turned around to face the noise, thinking it was one of his medical instruments, but instead was met with an explosion, throwing shrapnel into his leg. His patient fared much worse.

“The patient lost consciousness; he started bleeding. His face, neck and lips were burned. He had knife-like cuts, as if he was hit by a rocket,” Yusuf, a doctor from Beirut speaking under a pseudonym, said while waiting for an injured friend outside a Beirut hospital on Tuesday night. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a small wound, the remnants of his patient’s exploded pager.

Tuesday’s attacks, which targeted pagers used by members of Hezbollah and have been attributed to Israel, left at least 2,800 injured and 12 dead, including two children and a healthcare worker. The scale was “far greater” than that of the Beirut port blast some four years earlier, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history, which left more than 7,000 injured, Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, said. Two-thirds of those wounded in the Tuesday’s attacks needed hospitalisation, a greater proportion even than those hurt in the port explosion, the minister explained.

On Wednesday, walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members for communication began to explode across Lebanon in a similar fashion to the previous day’s attacks. A video showed a blast suddenly striking a Hezbollah member during a funeral in Beirut for a fighter killed on Tuesday, knocking him down and sending the crowd running. At least 14 people have been killed by the walkie-talkie detonations and hundreds injured.

The wide-ranging attacks extended all the way to Syria, where at least four Hezbollah members were injured by pager explosions in al-Qalamoun, Damascus and Seida Zeinab, according to Fadel Abdulghani, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

News of Tuesday’s attack trickled in at first, starting with information regarding a security incident in Beirut, then the southern city of Tyre, and the Bekaa valley. Soon it was all over the news, with pictures of people with mangled limbs and bloodied faces emerging from all over the country. The sound of ambulance sirens started and would continue non-stop, deep into the night.

Abiad issued a call for all health workers to go to their stations, and Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces asked citizens to stay off the streets so that ambulances could reach hospitals.

“I didn’t understand what was happening; the first thing I thought was that it was a terrorist attack,” said Ali, a 22-year-old trader from the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp, interviewed while waiting outside a Beirut hospital for an injured friend on Tuesday night. “People started throwing their phones on the ground out of fear; they thought they would explode.”

Ali was in a popular market in Burj al-Barajneh when the explosions started. Though he did not hear them, their aftermath became quickly apparent.

“I saw a man trying to hold his face together; it had completely split. His eyes had popped out of his skull and blood was pouring out,” Ali said.

Hours after Tuesday’s explosions, the wounded were still being transported to hospitals. At Rizk hospital in Beirut, dozens of families waiting outside the emergency room, eager for any news of their family and friends inside. People crowded the doors of arriving ambulances, peering into windows to see if any loved ones were inside.

A woman collapsed to the ground, wailing after first responders had no information on the whereabouts of her family member. Ya Ali!” she cried, a religious exhortation, as men tried to soothe her.

“You see that one? That one came all the way from Abbasiyeh,” Ali said, pointing to an arriving ambulance that had travelled more than two hours to find a hospital with available beds.

Doctors described “apocalyptic” scenes inside emergency rooms, where young men, women and children alike poured in nonstop.

“I was in my house when I heard what happened, so I came back [to the hospital]. People were crying, shouting ‘I can’t see!’” an anaesthesiologist who worked at the Beirut Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital said on Wednesday morning under the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorised to speak to the press.

The doctor said that the injuries were unlike anything they had seen before, mainly wounded eyes and hands, a result of patients looking at their pagers before they exploded.

“Never do you have eye emergencies at this frequency. It’s transforming 2,000 people into disabled [people] at the same time,” another doctor at the same hospital said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday that the attack could be a violation of international humanitarian law, through its use of pagers as booby traps, and that it had put civilians at risk.

“The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate … and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction,” Lama Fakih, the Middle East and north Africa director at HRW, said.

As families waited outside the hospital, individual volunteers emerged to distribute water bottles and manakeesh, a Lebanese flatbread. A line of people formed outside the hospital as people came to donate blood.

“I’m horrified by the level of sophisticated evil. It’s completely crazy,” said Maliha Raydan, a 50-year-old mother of two, while distributing supplies outside Rizk hospital. “We were wondering what we could do, so we thought it would be a good thing to do.”

The apparently limitless suspected reach of Israeli intelligence had instilled anxiety in Raydan and others, some of whom refused to speak to the press for fear it would make them a future target for Israel.

“By doing this today, they can get to anyone. They can get to us in our bedrooms. They breach all laws of war and humanity. And no one is stopping them,” Raydan said.

For others, fear was pushed aside by a deep anger – mainly at the indiscriminate nature of the attack.

“I am a medical worker, but the grudge I have now … I will insist on teaching it to my great-great-grandson. I was neutral, but now I’m going to take a side,” Yusuf said, stressing, however, that his resistance would be non-violent.