Death toll from Hezbollah pager explosions in Lebanon rises to 12

Lebanon’s health minister said an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy were among the dead, as well as several healthcare workers from Dahiyeh, in southern Beirut, who had been using pagers.

Of the 2,800 people who were wounded, about 750 were in the south of Lebanon, 150 in the Bekaa Valley, and about 1,850 in the capital and its suburbs, he added.

Mr Abiad said a large number of patients were in intensive care, some due to injuries affecting their ability to breathe. Others had injuries related to bleeding, including brain haemorrhages.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured by one of the blasts, but his family and Iranian officials said he was in a “good and stable condition”.

In an interview with the BBC, an ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University Hospital in Beirut said the past 24 hours there had been “a nightmare”.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to save a lot of eyes,” Dr Elias Warrak said, adding that more than 60 to 70% of the patients ended up with at least one eye removed.

“Some of the patients, we had to remove both eyes. It kills me. In my past 25 years in practice, I’ve never removed as many eyes as I did yesterday.”

Hezbollah has announced the deaths of 12 fighters since Tuesday afternoon, including the son of the Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar. However, it has not given details on the locations and circumstances, saying only that they were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem” – a phrase it has been using to refer to fighters killed by Israel.

The only death the group directly attributed to a pager explosion was an employee of the al-Rassoul Al-Aazam Hospital in southern Beirut.