Update: The Lebanese government has lowered the estimate of wounded to 2,750 people, denying speculation that as many as 4,000 people had been wounded, according to the Times of Israel. Nine people are confirmed dead.
A Lebanese minister reported Tuesday that eight people had been killed and 2,800 injured in an apparent attack on Hezbollah members and fighters that targeted the pagers that the organization has been using for communications.
The Times of Israel reported:
Lebanon’s health minister says eight were killed and some 2,800 were wounded, including 200 seriously, in the pager blasts in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has said that two members are among the dead. A young girl, the daughter of a Hezbollah member, was also reported killed after a pager exploded in her parents’ home.
Images and videos on social media showed men with wounds to their abdomens and chests, presumably as a result of the exploding pagers, which detonated at roughly the same time on Tuesday.
Reports speculated that Hezbollah may have discarded their other, more sophisticated mobile devices after Israel killed Hezbollah’s second-in-command, Fuad Shukr, in July. It is not clear how the pagers were hacked, and it has not been confirmed that Israel hacked them, but there was speculation that malware may have caused the devices’ lithium batteries to overheat and to explode.
The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured in the attack. The son of a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament was killed.
According to reports, pagers also exploded in Syria as well, where Hezbollah and Iran conduct military operations.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.