Admits ‘historic’ blow in device bombings, says Hezbollah chief

The leader of Hezbollah admitted on Thursday that his organization had suffered a “unprecedented” blow when thousands of operatives’ communication devices blew up all over Lebanon in attacks that were fatal and that it attributed to Israel.

In his first speech following the two-day attacks that left 37 dead and almost 3,000 wounded, Hassan Nasrallah took a strong stance and promised that Israel would pay a price.

Israeli airplanes smashed the sound barrier above Beirut even as he was giving his televised speech.

Nasrallah declared that Israel will face “tough retribution and just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not,” calling the assaults a “massacre” and even a “act of war.”

Regarding the strikes that sent the nation into panic when Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies detonated in stores, on the streets, and at funerals, Israel has not responded.

However, Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense, stated on Wednesday that “the center of gravity is moving northward” with reference to Israel’s border with Lebanon.

“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” warned him.

Iran-supported Hezbollah is an ally of Hamas, a militant Palestinian organization that has been engaged in hostilities in Gaza since attacking Israel on October 7.

Israel has been concentrating its firepower on Gaza for almost a year, but its military have also been fighting Hezbollah fighters almost every day along its northern border.

There have been hundreds of deaths in Israel, including military, and hundreds in Lebanon, mostly among fighters.

Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes due to the firefights on both sides of the border.

Nasrallah promised that Hezbollah will continue to battle Israel until a cease-fire was achieved in Gaza.

Hamas applauded the pledge of assistance.

Israel’s military operations against Hezbollah, according to Gallant, “will continue”.

“There are great chances and great risks in this new phase of the fight. The minister stated, “Hezbollah feels persecuted.”

On Thursday, the Israeli military declared that it had struck “hundreds of rocket launcher barrels” that were prepared to be fired towards Israel, in addition to “approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites” in Lebanon.

It stated that two troops had died close to the boundary.

“Wider war”

Twenty or more people were killed when their walkie-talkies blew up, according to a source close to Hezbollah, which claimed that 25 of its members had perished in the device blasts.

The “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security,” according to Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, is a risky move that might “signal a wider war.”

He added that Lebanon had lodged a complaint against “Israel’s cyber-terrorist aggression that amounts to a war crime” ahead of a UN Security Council discussion on the attacks scheduled for this Friday.

The explosions that injured Tehran’s envoy in Beirut prompted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to warn Israel that it would face “a crushing response from the resistance front”.

All sides should exercise patience, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged. Blinken has been working feverishly to salvage negotiations for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release agreement.

As he joined other European foreign ministers in Paris to discuss the worsening situation, he declared, “We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would jeopardize the objective of a truce in Gaza.

President Joe Biden is still optimistic that Israel and Hezbollah can reach a diplomatic agreement, according to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “He thinks it’s doable,” she stated at a briefing.

Mahmud Abbas, the president of Palestine, requested a fresh peace conference in Madrid with the goal of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

An AFP count based on Israeli official numbers that includes hostages died in captivity shows that 1,205 Israelis lost their lives as a result of Hamas’s extraordinary October 7 strikes, which ignited the Gaza conflict and largely killed civilians.

Of the 251 hostages taken by terrorists, 97 are being kept in Gaza; of them, 33 are reportedly dead according to the Israeli military.

At least 41,272 individuals have died in Gaza as a result of Israel’s retaliatory military onslaught, the majority of whom were civilians, according to data released by the health ministry of the Hamas-run region. The figures have been recognized as credible by the United Nations.

After the explosions, Lebanon saw an influx of wounded so large that it overwhelmed medical personnel and caused panic.

“It’s terrifying what happened over the past two days. It’s terrible,” Lina Ismail told AFP over the phone from Baalbek, in the east.

She said in a shaky voice, “I took away my daughter’s power bank and we even sleep with our mobile phones in a separate room.”

Following a ruling by Lebanese civil aviation authorities, Qatar Airways declared that all travelers departing from Beirut would be “prohibited from carrying pagers and walkie-talkies on board flights.”

“Destroyed at the source”

A security officer revealed that the pagers had been booby-trapped based on the preliminary results of a Lebanese investigation.

The investigation revealed that “the targeted devices were professionally booby-trapped… before arriving in Lebanon, and were detonated by sending emails to the devices,” the nation’s UN delegation to the UN agreed in a letter.

A Hezbollah-affiliated source, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed the pagers had been “sabotaged at source” and had only lately been imported.

The pagers that detonated were created by Hungary-based BAC Consulting for Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, according to a story published in the New York Times on Wednesday. It quoted intelligence officials as suggesting that BAC was a front organization for Israel.

The business was described as “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary” by a government official in Budapest.

The radio model that was allegedly used in the explosions in Lebanon on Wednesday was discontinued by the Japanese company Icom almost ten years ago.