'Apocalyptic' scene in hospital after thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon

Two beeps and a pause were the only warning Yusuf received. He turned to see what the noise was, thinking it was one of his medical instruments, but instead there was an explosion, sending shrapnel into his leg.

His patient was in much worse condition.

“The patient was unconscious; he started bleeding. His face, neck, and lips were burned. He had knife-like cuts, as if he had been hit by a piece of rocket,” Yusuf, a doctor in Beirut whose real identity is being withheld for his safety, said as he waited for his injured friend outside a local hospital on the night of September 17. He rolled up his pants leg, revealing a small wound.

"People started throwing their phones on the ground in fear"

The September 17 attacks, which targeted pagers used by Hezbollah members and were blamed on Israel, left at least 2,800 people injured and 12 dead, including two children and a medical worker. The scale of the blast was “much larger” than the Beirut port blast about four years earlier, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history, which injured more than 7,000 people, Lebanon’s Health Minister Firas Abiad said.

On September 17, numerous walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members to communicate began exploding across Lebanon, in a similar fashion to the pager attacks a day earlier.

A video circulating on social media shows a sudden explosion targeting a Hezbollah member during a funeral in Beirut for a militant who was killed on September 17. The man falls and the crowd flees. At least 14 people were killed by the walkie-talkie explosions and hundreds were injured.

The widespread attacks have spread to Syria, where at least four Hezbollah members were injured by pager explosions in al-Qalamoun, Damascus and Seida Zeinab, according to Fadel Abdulghani, founder of the Syrian Human Rights Network.

News of the September 17 attacks began to trickle in, first with reports of a security incident in Beirut, then the southern city of Tyre and the Bekaa Valley. The news quickly spread across the country, with images of wounded limbs and bloodied faces appearing across the country. Ambulance sirens began to sound and continued into the night.

Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad ordered all medical staff to the station, and Lebanon's Internal Security Forces asked people to stay off the streets so ambulances could reach the hospital.

“I didn’t understand what was happening; the first thing I thought was that it was a terrorist attack,” said Ali, a 22-year-old trader from the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp, as he waited for an injured friend outside a Beirut hospital on the night of September 17.

“People started throwing their phones on the ground out of fear; they thought they were going to explode,” he added.

Ali was in a crowded market at Burj al-Barajneh when the explosion began. Although he did not hear anything at first, the aftermath of the explosion quickly became clear.

“I saw a man trying to hold his face together; his face was broken. His eyes were bulging out of his skull and blood was coming out,” Ali recounted.

Hours after the September 17 explosion, wounded victims continued to arrive at hospitals. At Beirut’s Rizk Hospital, dozens of families waited outside the emergency room, anxious for news of family and friends inside. People crowded around the doors of arriving ambulances, peering into the windows to see if any loved ones were inside.

A woman collapsed to the ground, wailing after first responders had no information on the whereabouts of her family members. She screamed a spiritual plea, as bystanders tried to comfort her.

“See that car? That one came from Abbasiyeh,” Ali said, pointing to an arriving ambulance that had traveled more than two hours to find a hospital with an empty bed.

Unprecedented scene of tragedy

Doctors described “apocalyptic” scenes inside emergency rooms, where young men, women and children were being brought in in droves.

“I was at home when I heard what happened, so I went back (to the hospital). People were crying, screaming, ‘I can’t see anything!’,” an anesthesiologist working at Beirut’s Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital said on the morning of September 18, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Doctors said the injuries were unlike anything they had seen before, with the eyes and hands being injured mainly because the patients were looking at the pagers before they exploded.

"We have never had eye emergencies at this frequency. 2,000 people turned into disabled patients at the same time," said another doctor at the same hospital.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on September 18 that the attack may violate international humanitarian law, by using pagers as booby traps and endangering civilians.

“The use of an explosive device whose exact location cannot be known would be unlawfully indiscriminate … and would therefore strike military and civilian targets without any discrimination,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at HRW.

As families waited outside the hospital, volunteers showed up and handed out bottles of water and manakeesh, a Lebanese flatbread. People lined up outside the hospital to donate blood.

“I was horrified by the level of cruelty and sophistication of the attack. It was crazy,” said Maliha Raydan, a 50-year-old mother of two, as she distributed supplies outside Rizk hospital. “We were wondering what we could do, so we thought this would be a good thing to do,” she said.

The unpredictable scope of Israel's intelligence operations sows further confusion for Raydan and many others, some of whom refuse to speak to the press for fear that it could make them future targets of Israel.

“With today’s move, they can approach anyone. They can approach us in our private bedrooms. They violate all the laws of war and human rights. And no one can stop them,” Raydan said.

For others, fear is being pushed aside by deep anger — largely because of the indiscriminate nature of the attack.

“I am a health worker, but now I am filled with hatred… I will not drown that feeling anymore. I was neutral, but now I will take a side,” Yusuf said, but stressed that his resistance would be non-violent.