Smoke rises from a shop in Sidon south of Beirut after an explosion<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d Yusuf, a doctor from Beirut speaking under a pseudonym, said while waiting for an injured friend outside a Beirut hospital. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a small wound, the remnants of his patient\u2019s exploded pager.<\/p>\n
The complex operation \u2013 probably carried out by Israeli intelligence \u2013 on Tuesday that targeted the pagers used by members of Hezbollah<\/a> left at least 2,800 injured and 12 dead, including two children and a healthcare worker. A further round of explosions on Wednesday, apparently targeting the group\u2019s walkie-talkie radios<\/a>, injured dozens more.<\/p>\n The scale of the attack was \u201cfar greater\u201d 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\u2019s health minister, Firas Abiad, said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n The wide-ranging attack extended all the way to Syria, where at least four Hezbollah<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n News of the attack at first trickled in, 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.<\/p>\n Abiad issued a call for all health workers to go to their stations and Lebanon\u2019s Internal Security Forces asked citizens to stay off the streets so that ambulances could reach hospitals.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t understand what was happening; the first thing I thought was that it was a terrorist attack,\u201d 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. \u201cPeople started throwing their phones on the ground out of fear; they thought they would explode.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Ali said.<\/p>\n Hours after the 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.<\/p>\n A woman collapsed to the ground, wailing after first responders had no information on the whereabouts of her family member. Ya Ali!\u201d she cried, a religious exhortation, as men tried to soothe her.<\/p>\n \u201cYou see that one? That one came all the way from Abbasiyeh,\u201d Ali said, pointing to an arriving ambulance that had traveled more than two hours to find a hospital with available beds.<\/p>\n Doctors described \u201capocalyptic\u201d scenes inside emergency rooms, where young men, women and children alike poured in non-stop.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in my house when I heard what happened, so I came back [to the hospital]. People were crying, shouting \u2018I can\u2019t see!\u2019\u201d an anaesthesiologist who worked at the Beirut H\u00f4tel-Dieu de France hospital said on Wednesday morning under the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorised to speak to the press.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cNever do you have eye emergencies at this frequency. It\u2019s transforming 2,000 people into disabled [people] at the same time,\u201d another doctor at the same hospital said.<\/p>\n Human Rights Watch (HRW) said<\/a> on Wednesday that the attack could be a violation of international humanitarian law through its use of pagers as \u201cbooby traps\u201d and that it put civilians at risk.<\/p>\n \u201cThe use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate \u2026 and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction,\u201d Lama Fakih, the Middle East and north Africa<\/a> director at HRW, said.<\/p>\n As families waited outside the hospital, individual volunteers emerged to distribute water bottles and Manakeesh, a Lebanese flat bread. A line of people formed outside the hospital as people came to donate blood.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m horrified by the level of sophisticated evil. It\u2019s completely crazy,\u201d said Maliha Raydan, a 50-year-old mother of two, while distributing supplies outside Rizk hospital. \u201cWe were wondering what we could do, so we thought it would be a good thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cBy 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,\u201d Raydan said.<\/p>\n For others, fear was pushed aside by a deep anger \u2013 mainly at the indiscriminate nature of the attack.<\/p>\n \u201cI am a medical worker, but the grudge I have now \u2026 I will insist on teaching it to my great-great-grandson. I was neutral, but now I\u2019m going to take a side,\u201d Yusuf said, stressing however that his resistance would be non-violent.<\/p>\n