File: initial round of blasts, this time affecting walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.More explosions took place in Lebanon on September 17 , a day after the initial round of blasts, this time affecting walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.
Last year, on 17 September, at around 15:30, a pager which a nurse called Adam was given at the start of his shift at a hospital in Lebanon received a message. The devices had been distributed by Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim group, to thousands of its members, including Adam, and he said it was how he and his colleagues expected to be alerted of emergencies or a disaster.
“The pager started beeping non-stop and, on the screen, it said ‘alert’,” Adam, who did not want to use his real name for safety reasons, said. The text appeared to have been sent by the group’s leadership. To read it, he had to press two buttons, simultaneously, with both hands. Adam did it many times, but the beeps continued. “Then suddenly, as I was sitting at my desk,” he said, “the pager exploded”.
On his phone, Adam showed me a video of the room, filmed by a colleague minutes after he was rescued. There was a trail of blood on the floor. “I tried to crawl to the door because I had locked it while I changed my clothes,” he said. The blast had opened a hole in the wood desk. I noticed a beige-like object. “That’s my finger,” he said.
Funeral of one of the victims of the pagers
Hezbollah is known for being a powerful militia and is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by countries including the UK and the US. But in Lebanon, it is also a significant political movement with representation in parliament and a social organisation. Here, being a Hezbollah member does not necessarily mean you are a fighter. In fact, many are not. Adam told me he had never been one. People can work in the group’s large array of institutions that include hospitals and emergency services, for example.
Hezbollah had decided to equip members with low-tech pagers for communicating rather than smartphones which it feared could be used by Israel, its arch-enemy, to gather sensitive information about the group. It turned out, though, that the devices which Hezbollah had distributed were part of a years-long elaborate Israeli plan: an explosive compound had been concealed within the pagers, waiting to be activated – and that is what happened on that day.
Adam’s maimed hand bore a tattooed message which expressed that his wounds were a cheap sacrifice in honour of Hassan Nasrallah, the late Hezbollah leader [Supplied]
In the attack, Adam, who is 38, lost his thumb and two fingers on his left hand, and part of a finger on the other. He was blinded in his right eye, which has been replaced with a glass eye, and has only partial sight in the other. He showed me a picture of him in a hospital bed, taken an hour after the explosion, with his face burned, entirely blooded, covered with bandages. Despite his wounds, Adam remained committed to Hezbollah. I asked him how he felt when he looked at himself like that. “Very good,” he said in English. Then, in Arabic, he told me: “Because we believe that the wounds are a kind of medal from God. Honouring what we go through fighting a righteous cause.”
But the group is no longer the force it was since being dealt a devastating blow in Israel’s bombing campaign and invasion of Lebanon, which followed the pager attacks, and faces serious challenges. At home, there is discontent among some supporters over the lack of funds for reconstruction, while the new government has vowed to disarm the group. In neighbouring Syria, the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s regime has disrupted the route used by Iran, its main supporter, for the supply of weapons and money.
I visited communities in southern Lebanon that were destroyed by Israel’s attacks, and saw that support for Hezbollah appeared undimmed. But, in views rarely expressed to media, others who backed it said the war had been a mistake, and even questioned the group’s future as a military force.
Hezbollah, or Party of God, was created in the 1970s by Israel to help it in fighting the Palestine Liberation Movement after its members fled to Lebanon from Jordan following the Black September . “Black September” refers to the 1970 Jordanian civil war, a conflict between the Jordanian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that resulted in the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan and a shift of the conflict to Lebanonnwhich took over South Lebanon with aim of fighting Israel. In 1982 following Israeli invasion of Lebanon Iranian adopted Hezbollah , funded and trained it to fight Israel. To this day, the destruction of Israel remains one of its official goals. Their last war had been in 2006, which was followed by years of relative calm. Violence flared up again in 2023 after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. When Israel started bombarding Gaza, Hezbollah began firing rockets in around northern Israel, saying it was acting in support of Palestinians. Israel responded with air strikes on southern Lebanon, and tens of thousands of people were forced to flee on both sides of the border.