Israel’s response to the attack on the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night: Hezbollah’s reprimanding the Iranians

Jawad Rizkallah reported from Beirut, and Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv. They contributed to the report from Tel Aviv. Tom Bowman contributed from Washington.

“The Iranians are still talking about retaliating after the elimination of Haniyeh,” said Orna Mizrahi, a Hezbollah watcher and senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. The Iranians may be more willing to do something after this action.

In the days leading up to Tuesday’s pagers operation, Israel’s leadership had publicly warned that only military action could stop Hezbollah’s attacks and allow Israeli civilians to return to their homes near the border with Lebanon.

Jake Williams is the vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy and used to work for the US National Security Agency. The scale of this supply chain compromise is unprecedented. It’s hard to imagine what technology Hezbollah could consider ‘safe’ at this point.”

Israel will face punishment for the attacks, said Hezbollah. The form that punishment could take has not been specified. But the group’s capacity to initiate an all-out war has been severely limited, security experts say.

“Israel might be dreaming of reestablishing a ‘security zone’ in Lebanon, or replicating the ‘perimeter’ tactic — creating a buffer zone around the Gaza Strip — to push back the threat,” wrote columnist Zvi Bar’el in the left-leaning Haaretz. “This would imply a long-term occupation inside Lebanon, repeating the same mistake and expecting different results.”

Israeli commentators praised the detonations but said they were out of concern for the mission and information leak because they hadn’t originally planned to do it.

New bombardments of Hezbollah’s digital devices in Lebanon and Syria: a warning against snooping on digital devices from an Israeli perspective

The group told NPR that Hezbollah handed out pagers to operatives as well as civilians. Four health care workers, including one working at a Hezbollah-affiliated hospital, an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy were among those killed, Lebanon’s acting health minister said. Hezbollah is a political party in Lebanon as well as an armed militia.

Between January and February, Hezbollah stopped using smartphones and adopted pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance, said Amer Al Sabaileh, a Jordanian geopolitical analyst and security expert with contacts inside Hezbollah.

The Israeli government did not say if it was responsible for the attacks on Hezbollah’s devices. But a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak to reporters, told NPR that Israel notified Washington that it had carried out Tuesday’s attacks.

With Hezbollah and Lebanon still reeling from a coordinated wave of pager explosions on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people and injured thousands, another bombardment began on Wednesday with the use of exploding two-way radios. The footage of the explosions appears to show even larger blasts than those that came from the pagers.

There were new explosions less than a day after a series of pager blasts in Lebanon and parts of Syria left 12 people dead.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke on Wednesday about “excellent achievements” by Israel’s military and intelligence branches leading to “impressive results,” but without mentioning the device attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Before the explosions that injured and claimed the lives of Hezbollah operatives, the group had already been afraid of snooping on its digital devices.

Nasrallah told the crowd to break it, bury it, and lock it up in a metal box. “Do it for a week, two weeks, a month. … These are deadly spies.”

Photo and Video of Detonations in Lebanon on Wednesday, December 13: a Day After the Destructions of a Home Solar System

According to the news agency, home solar systems were destroyed less than two hours after the detonations began. Details of the alleged solar equipment attacks were still developing at the time of publication.

“There have been so many catastrophes and mass casualties in Lebanon, but this was the first time we have seen so many casualties in such a short period of time,” Dr. Zeineddine said.

Photos and videos posted to social media on Wednesday appeared to show handheld radios, or walkie-talkies, in various states of destruction. The devices, which are larger and bulkier than phones, have one side of their encased in something else. Cars, scooters, and even buildings seem to have been damaged by tampered devices, according to experts in the Middle East.

People disconnected their appliances quickly. Others disconnected the solar systems that powered their homes. Many kept their cellphones away from them and refused to answer calls. Residents of Lebanon viewed baby monitors and TVs with suspicion. They could possibly be the next devices to explode.

Hussein Awada, who works as a private driver, said that lighters might explode tomorrow. “If you want to light a cigarette, it will just explode in your hand.”

The first explosion of booby-trapping Hezbollah’s devices at the hospital in Lebanon: “Beyond any catastrophe,” says Dr. Zeineddine

The work that went into booby-trapping Hezbollah’s devices and the apparently seamless coordination of the attack was like a work of fiction to Mr. Awada.

Hezbollah is designated a terrorist group by Israel and the United States because of its military and political power in Lebanon. But for many Lebanese, it is an organization with deep roots in society, providing a roster of social services and welfare programs across the country in the place of the ailing state.

“In Dahieh, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know someone who was affected,” said Mortada Smaoui, 30, a local business owner, using the Arabic name for Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs. It is either your friend, a relative or a friend of friend, so you can feel the anger and sadness.

Mr Smaoui went to the closest hospital after he heard about the first attack. He watched the carnage firsthand, from bodies being carried away in blood-covered sheets, family members frantically searching for their loved ones and the wails of injured victims being turned away because of a lack of beds.

Still, Mr. Smaoui said after the first attack that it had shown Lebanon at its best, with citizens from across the country’s sectarian patchwork coming together to clear roads and give blood, so much so that hospitals had to turn away prospective donors.

“There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Mr. Smaoui said in the minutes after the second round of explosions, staring up at an apartment block engulfed in flames.

Dr. Salah Zeineddine, the chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, said the attacks were “beyond any catastrophe” he had dealt with before. After the first wave of explosions, nearly 200 patients were rushed to the hospital in just three hours.