Hizbollah walkie-talkies explode in Lebanon in second day of blasts

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Handheld walkie-talkies and other wireless communication devices used by Hizbollah were detonated across Lebanon on Wednesday, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 300 a day after thousands of pagers exploded in the country.

Hizbollah has blamed Israel for Tuesday’s attack, in which thousands of pagers carried by the militant group’s members detonated across Lebanon, killing 12 people including two children and injuring almost 2,800. Hizbollah has vowed revenge against the Jewish state, which has not commented on the blasts.

At least one explosion on Wednesday took place near a funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs, organised by Hizbollah for several of the people killed on Tuesday, a Financial Times reporter witnessed. There were reports on Wednesday of other electronic devices exploding in Lebanon, including rooftop solar energy panels, according to NNA.

Lebanon’s health ministry said nine people had been killed and more than 300 wounded on Wednesday, bringing the toll from two days of blasts to 21 dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Almost 300 of those wounded in Tuesday’s blasts remained in a critical condition on Wednesday.

Hizbollah and Israel have been engaged in cross-border fire since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, prompting fears of a wider war. Almost 24 hours after the pager explosions, Hizbollah said it had launched rockets at Israeli artillery positions across the border, the first strike since Tuesday’s attack raised the prospect of a wider regional conflagration.

Asked about Tuesday’s explosions, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Wednesday in Cairo that he was focused on agreeing a ceasefire deal in Gaza that could also bring calm to the Israel-Lebanon border.

When the US and other mediators believed they were making progress on such a deal, Blinken said, they had often “seen an event that . . . threatens to slow it, stop it, derail it”.

Other explosions took place, including from the handheld radios, on Wednesday in Beirut, Tyre, Baalbek and the Bekaa Valley, as well as in scattered villages and towns in the south, according to NNA. The state news agency also said there was heavy surveillance drone traffic over the country’s south. These are all areas with a heavy Hizbollah presence.

Gruesome images circulated on social media for the second day running, showing fire-damaged cars and motorbikes, apartment buildings ablaze and bloodied people being rushed to hospitals in ambulances.

At the funeral in Beirut’s southern suburb of Ghobeiry, thousands of mourners had gathered for the funeral of a child, two Hizbollah members and a health worker killed in Tuesday’s blasts. 

That funeral — already tense — was interrupted by a loud boom that echoed over the procession, sending mourners stampeding away in fear.

As ambulance sirens sounded, a man ran through the crowd shouting: “It exploded in his hand.” A Lebanese soldier stationed near the funeral, where weeping family members held up images of their slain relatives, said that “two devices had exploded”.