stan van houcke

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

I was at the funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs for two Hezbollah fighters, a paramedic and a 12-year-old boy who were killed by exploding pagers a day before when we heard a loud explosion. There was chaos everywhere as a loudspeaker called for people to remove the batteries from their phones.

55 minutes ago

Johnatan Reiss

Reporting from Tel Aviv

Israel's defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said the “center of gravity” of Israel’s war with its enemies is “moving north,” referring to the country’s northern border with Lebanon. Gallant said he estimates the countries are now found “at the outset of a new period in this war,” according to a statement by his office. He did not explicitly mention the explosions in Lebanon or claim Israeli responsibility.

58 minutes ago

Farnaz Fassihi

The United Nations Security Council will convene an emergency meeting on Friday afternoon to discuss Israel’s wave of attacks in Lebanon, according to Slovenia, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency this month. The meeting was requested by Algeria, the only Arab country on the Council.

1 hour ago

Anushka Patil

The U.N.’s special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said she was “pained” by the additional casualties caused by the new wave of explosions on Wednesday. “Further escalatory actions risk devastating consequences,” she said on social media.

1 hour ago

Sanjana Varghese

A video posted on social media and verified by The New York Times shows a fire breaking out at a residential complex in Haret Hreik, in Beirut.

1 hour ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

At least nine people have been killed and more than 300 injured in the newest round of explosions, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Ambulances clogged the roads and some hospitals in southern Lebanon were said to be overwhelmed with dozens of casualties, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency.

Credit...Mohammad Zaatari/Associated Press

2 hours ago

Anushka Patil

Fires have broken out in homes, cars and shops in several parts of Lebanon, including the Bekaa Valley, a rural area on the eastern border with Syria, and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Lebanese Civil Defense emergency rescue organization said.

2 hours ago

Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

The Hungarian government has distanced the country from reports that a Hungary-based company was involved in the production of the pagers that exploded on Tuesday in Lebanon. In an emailed statement, the government said that “the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address, and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary.”

2 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

In an initial toll, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that one person had been killed and more than hundred injured in the new wave of explosions which targeted “wireless devices.”

2 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

The Lebanese Red Cross said that 30 ambulance teams were responding to “multiple explosions” in different areas of Lebanon, including the country’s south and east.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Hezbollah said that more explosions had occurred in different areas of Lebanon on Wednesday, this time affecting handheld radios.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Mortada Smaoui, 30, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, said that another wave of simultaneous explosions had struck his neighborhood. “There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Smaoui, 30, said, adding that firefighters and soldiers were rushing to the scene.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Jerusalem

Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s official broadcaster, reported additional explosions of wireless devices in multiple locations in Lebanon.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

A loud explosion could be heard at the funeral for Hezbollah fighters in Beirut’s southern suburbs. People are shouting to switch off and remove the batteries from phones. Loudspeakers are blaring over the crowds ordering them to do the same.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Jerusalem

Lebanese state news media report at least two new explosions, one of which it attributed to a pager blowing up inside a car in Marjaayoun in southern Lebanon. The circumstances were not immediately clear.

3 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Dr. Salah Zeineddine, the chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, said that staff members had been put on standby by the Lebanese authorities following reports of a new round of explosions across the country.

4 hours ago

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Hezbollah has claimed its first cross-border strike since the series of pager blasts, striking on Wednesday afternoon what it said were Israeli artillery positions with rockets. The attacks did not appear to be part of the expected retaliation for the explosions a day earlier, and the group said it came in response to Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon.

4 hours ago

Nick Cumming-Bruce

Reporting from Geneva

The United Nations’ human rights chief, Volker Türk, has criticized the pager attack as a violation of international law and called for those behind it to be held to account. “Simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge of who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack, violates international human rights law,” he said in a statement.

4 hours ago

Reporting from Jerusalem

Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian foreign minister, blamed Israel for the attack on Hezbollah pagers and said it was increasing the likelihood of a military escalation. “Israel is pushing the entire region toward the abyss of regional war,” Safadi told reporters. “Such a war would have drastic ramifications not only for the region, but for the world.”

4 hours ago

Hwaida Saad and Liam Stack

Hwaida Saad reported from Saraain, Lebanon.

A 9-year-old girl killed in the pager attack is laid to rest.

Mourners with bowed heads standing around a coffin covered in a white flag, in a cemetery in a hilly area. — The funeral for Fatima Abdullah, who was killed when a pager exploded in her home, in Saraain, Lebanon, on Wednesday.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Relatives and friends with Hezbollah flags and shawl gathered to remember Fatima.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Many in the crowd were children.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Mourners gathered in the village of Saraain on Wednesday for the funeral of the youngest confirmed victim of the pager attack in Lebanon: 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah.

“The enemy killed us using this small device!” mourners chanted as they made their way through the dry grass of a cemetery. “They killed our child Fatima!”

Zeinab Mousawi, an aunt, said Fatima had just come home from her first day of fourth grade not long before the attack. Many of the mourners were Fatima’s school friends, their faces contorted with grief and shock at the violent death of someone so young.

She was one of two children killed in the attacks on Tuesday that Lebanese officials said had left at least 12 people dead, and that injured nearly 2,800 others. Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said on Wednesday that a second child had died from injuries sustained in the attack. Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group whose members were the apparent target of the explosions, named the second child as Bilal Kanj, 11.

In the attack, pagers across Lebanon simultaneously exploded at 3:30 p.m.

American and other officials briefed on the operation said on Tuesday that Israel had programmed the devices to beep for several seconds before exploding. The victims included nearly 300 people who suffered critical injuries — mostly wounds to the eyes, face and limbs — and others who lost hands or fingers, Dr. Abiad said.

Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement in the explosions.

Fatima was in the kitchen on Tuesday when a pager on the table began to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to her father and was holding it when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood, she said.

“Fatima was trying to take courses in English,” Ms. Mousawi said. “She loved English.”

Her funeral was held in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a rural area on the border with Syria that is known as a deep well of support for Hezbollah. Many of the injuries on Tuesday occurred in the Bekaa Valley, in southern Lebanon and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the capital, all known as Hezbollah strongholds.

Before walking to the cemetery, mourners gathered in the town square, where women wiped tears from the face of Fatima’s weeping mother. A local religious leader led them in a prayer and beseeched God for justice.

Sumaya Mousawi, Fatima’s cousin, said at least 30 people in her hometown of Nabi Sheet were injured in the attack, many in the eyes or stomach. He said Israel would pay for what it had done.

“We are not afraid — the enemy is hiding in shelters, we are not,” he said. “We have missiles, we are strong and we are ready for war.”

5 hours ago

Daisuke Wakabayashi

Pagers, once ubiquitous, retain a niche appeal.

A woman wearing white pants and a blue shirt stands in front of packages of pagers lined up on a table. — Pagers at the Gold Apollo factory in Taiwan on Wednesday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

In the 1990s, before the widespread use of cellphones, pagers were the main way to reach people with urgent messages.

But pagers, which relay short messages over radio frequencies, quickly became less useful as mobile phones got smaller and more versatile. For the most part, the advent of do-everything smartphones made them obsolete.

The deadly attack in Lebanon on Tuesday targeting pagers carried by members of Hezbollah, which had been using the devices for years to make it harder for messages to be intercepted, has highlighted their low-tech features.

In some cases, pagers, also known as beepers, are considered more reliable than phones because they use radio frequencies that continue to work even if cellular networks are overwhelmed or Wi-Fi is unavailable.

Pagers can also be harder to track than smartphones because they lack more modern navigation technologies like the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

The pagers that exploded bore the name Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company. Gold Apollo denied on Wednesday that it had made the pagers, saying another manufacturer had done so under a license. The pagers had been implanted with explosive material by Israel before they reached Lebanon, American and other officials told The New York Times.

According to a promotional video, the pager model that Gold Apollo said was targeted in the attacks, the AR924, is waterproof and offers 85 days of battery life on a charge.

Pagers are still widely used in U.S. hospitals for staff to receive important messages. Companies that sell paging systems to hospitals note how pager radio signals penetrate steel and concrete when cellular signals or Wi-Fi may not.

The size of the global pager market was $1.6 billion in 2023, according to Cognitive Market Research, an industry data analysis firm. There are dozens of manufacturers in Taiwan and China that make different varieties of pagers.

Most of the prominent pager brands of the 1990s, such as Motorola, stopped producing the devices and large mobile carriers discontinued pager services many years ago. Pager networks are also used on a smaller scale. For example, the discs that many restaurants and coffee shops hand to waiting customers to alert them that their order or table is ready use pager technology.

6 hours ago

Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States did not know about the pager attack in advance and was not involved. “We are still gathering the information and gathering the facts,” he said at a news conference in Cairo with his Egyptian counterpart, Badr Abdelatty. Blinken said the U.S. has been “very clear about the importance of all parties avoiding any steps that could further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve in Gaza.”

Sept. 18, 2024

Reporting from Jerusalem

Israel’s police and Shin Bet intelligence service identified the target of an attempted bombing in Tel Aviv last year as Moshe Yaalon, a former Israeli military chief of staff and defense minister. The incident is back in the spotlight amid the pager attacks, and after the Israeli military said on Tuesday that Hezbollah operatives had been behind the bombing attempt.

Sept. 18, 2024

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

The death toll in the pager attacks has risen to 12, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told a news conference. The dead include two young children as well as a civilian health worker, he said.

Sept. 18, 2024

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Nearly 2,800 patients were rushed to hospitals within 30 minutes of the explosions on Tuesday afternoon, Abiad said, with most of the injuries happening in the Beirut area. Older people and children were among the injured, whose numbers swamped Lebanon’s hospitals. Nearly 300 people had critical injuries — mostly wounds to the eyes, face and limbs — while others lost hands or fingers, he said.

Sept. 18, 2024

Ben Hubbard

Reporting from Istanbul

The pager attacks embarrass Hezbollah but may not deter it, analysts say.

People, including a few wearing blue hospital scrubs, stand. A hospital gurney is in the foreground. — Outside the American University of Beirut Hospital on Tuesday, where many people injured in Tuesday’s attack were taken.Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters

Men from the most effective military force in Lebanon bleeding on the street and sprawled out in hospital beds, wounded not on the battlefield, but by devices carried in their pockets and worn on their belts.

This carnage, the result of what Lebanese, American and other officials have called an Israeli operation to remotely detonate hundreds of pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters, damaged and humiliated the group, puncturing its aura as one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated anti-Israel forces.

“This operation is basically Hezbollah’s Oct. 7,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, comparing the group’s security failures to those that allowed its ally, Hamas, to strike Israel last year, starting the war in Gaza. “It is a huge slap.”

The attack, carried out in hundreds of small, simultaneous explosions on Tuesday afternoon, blew off fingers, bloodied faces and damaged eyes, spreading fear across Lebanon and flooding emergency rooms with thousands of wounded patients.

While the victims included civilians — two of the 12 dead were children and one was a medical worker, Lebanon’s health minister said — the attack clearly targeted Hezbollah, disrupting its operations and potentially reshaping its fight against Israel.

Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement in the attack, which the Lebanese authorities say injured more than 2,700 people. For Hezbollah itself, experts said, the blow was both physical and psychological.

“It is a serious attack,” Mr. Hage Ali said, adding that during 11 months of aerial attacks across the Lebanon-Israel border, Hezbollah had lost many leaders and cadres, some in targeted assassinations.

“And now this blow cuts through the rank and file of the organization,” he said. “It is a kind of sword stabbed deep into the organization’s body, and it will take it time to heal from that.”

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, but its members appeared to be in shock, especially after a second wave of device explosions, including hand-held radios, occurred on Wednesday, including near the funerals of people killed the day before.

Hezbollah’s leaders have given no indication of how this attack could change its approach to its broader conflict with Israel. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is expected to speak on Thursday.

Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s, with Iranian help, to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. In the years since, it has grown into Lebanon’s most effective political party and fighting force, and expanded its operations into Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Rows of people in camouflage clothing and red hats face rows of seated people dressed in black, many with yellow fabric around their necks. A coffin draped in yellow cloth holding a large wreath sits between the two groups. — Hezbollah fighters at the funeral of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of the group, in the suburbs of Beirut in August.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

In Lebanon, it has deep roots in parts of society, as well an extensive apparatus to support its mission that includes offices dedicated to social services, communications and internal security.

The group has not said how many of its members and fighters were affected, but the wounded were overwhelmingly in areas where the group holds sway: the south, near the border with Israel; the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon; and the capital Beirut and its southern suburbs, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters on Wednesday.

Dr. Abiad said the attack had come with no warning and that thousands of patients had suddenly arrived in Lebanon’s emergency rooms. Nearly 10 percent of the cases were critical, and many patients remain in intensive care. Medics performed 460 operations, mostly on hands, faces and eyes.

Not all of the wounded were men of fighting age, he said.

“We saw that there were children, there were elderly people,” he said. “That shows that there were a lot of the pagers that were in houses. Maybe there was one whose children were playing with it.”

Hezbollah did not announce that any senior figures were among the dead, who included the son of a Hezbollah lawmaker. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, a key liaison between Hezbollah and its key sponsor, was wounded. Blasts were reported in shops, open markets and buildings where Hezbollah functionaries work.

Hezbollah goes to great lengths to keep the identities of its fighters secret, so much so that they often become known to their neighbors only when their deaths are announced. A secondary effect of the attack could be to blow that cover, leaving operatives with visible wounds that indicate their links to the group.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists, three Lebanese with knowledge of the matter said the pagers had arrived in Lebanon recently and were distributed because they were presumed to offer more secure communications than cellphones.

The group abandoned the devices right after the attack, likely disrupting its members’ ability to communicate. It was unclear whether any backup system was in place.

The attack will likely incapacitate some members, but Hezbollah has a long history of adaptability. It lost many fighters in its last major war with Israel, in 2006, but emerged stronger in the following years, building a vast arsenal that is believed to include more than 100,000 rockets and sophisticated weapons like precision-guided missiles that can hit sensitive sites inside Israel.

There is nothing in Hezbollah’s history or ideology that suggests that Tuesday’s attack will cause it to seek an accommodation with Israel. But experts on the group said it is stuck between feeling the need to respond and wanting to avoid an all-out war with Israelthat could be catastrophic for both sides.

Complicating its decision is that Hezbollah has linked its cross-border strikes on Israel to the war in Gaza, leading officials in Washington and elsewhere to hope that a cease-fire there between Israel and Hamas would bring quiet to the Lebanese border as well. Tuesday’s attack could change that calculation.

“Hezbollah is in a trap of its own making,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Having tied their confrontation with Israel to the ongoing war on Gaza limits their options to de-escalate. This attack makes it even harder for them to do so.”

Hezbollah could decide that the new attack necessitates its own retaliation, regardless of what happens in Gaza. The group could choose to deploy new weapons to strike military bases or civilian infrastructure inside Israel or seek to surprise Israel by targeting its interests elsewhere in the world.

Inside Lebanon, Hezbollah relies on a deeply loyal community to support its operations and provide it with fighters. It remains unclear how Tuesday’s blasts will affect this community, Ms. Slim said.

“This will also add to fatigue and weariness already developing inside Hezbollah’s constituency,” she said. “On the other hand, it might increase demands inside the constituency for Hezbollah to strike back hard.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.

Sept. 18, 2024

Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

NEWS ANALYSIS

Israel’s pager attack has no clear strategic goal, analysts say.

Several people stand beside a damaged vehicle in a parking lot near several high-rise buildings. — Inspecting a car in which a pager exploded in Beirut on Tuesday.Credit...Hussein Malla/Associated Press

Israel’s attack on pagers belonging to Hezbollah on Tuesday was a tactical success that had no clear strategic effect, analysts say.

While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has so far not altered the military balance along the Israeli-Lebanese border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle. Hezbollah and the Israeli military remained locked in the same pattern, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.

Although the attack on Tuesday was an eye-catching demonstration of Israel’s technological prowess, Israel has not so far sought to capitalize on the confusion it sowed by initiating a decisive blow against Hezbollah and invading Lebanon. A second wave of blasts was heard across Lebanon on Wednesday, reportedly caused by exploding walkie-talkies, but the Israeli military did not appear to be preparing for an imminent ground invasion.

And if the pager attack impressed many Israelis, some of whom had criticized their government for failing to stop Hezbollah’s strikes, their core frustration remained: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel’s northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home.

“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.

“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”

People crowd into a space outside a hospital near an ambulance and other vehicles. — Chaos hit hospitals around Beirut on Tuesday, including the American University of Beirut Medical Center, where many people wounded in the explosions were taken.Credit...Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The intricacy of the attack has restored some of the prestige and aura that Israel’s intelligence agencies lost on Oct. 7, when Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel that the Israeli military failed to predict or prepare for. Among Israelis, the devastation caused by Hamas’s attack dented their trust in the military leadership, and it has since prompted the resignation of the military intelligence chief, as well as the head of its main signal intelligence agency.

Still, Israelis are divided over whether the attack was born of short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.

Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. It may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.

“The goal of the operation, if Israel was behind it, as Hezbollah claims, may have been to show Hezbollah that it will pay a very high price if it continues its attacks on Israel instead of reaching an agreement,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate.

Hezbollah began firing on Israel in early October in solidarity with Hamas, after its Palestinian ally raided southern Israel, prompting a large-scale Israeli counterattack on Gaza. Since then, Hezbollah has tied its fate to that of Hamas, vowing that it will not stop fighting until Israel withdraws from Gaza.

Given the connection, officials on either side of the border have hoped for months that a truce in Gaza would lead to a parallel agreement in Lebanon. American and French mediators, led by Amos Hochstein, a U.S. envoy, have shuttled between Beirut and Jerusalem, preparing the ground for a truce between Israel and Hezbollah in the event of a deal in Gaza.

The expectation was that the Hezbollah war would end without the need for a bigger Israeli attack on Lebanon, as long as a solution could be found in Gaza.

With negotiations over Gaza now at an impasse, the Israeli leadership faces rising domestic pressure to find another way of coercing Hezbollah to stand down.

As a result, the Israeli leadership has recently intensified its public focus on Hezbollah, with the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, warning this week that “military action” was “the only way” to end the conflict.

The pager attack appeared to make good on that warning. Analysts said it had been an attempt to persuade Hezbollah to disentangle its fate from that of Hamas and, in doing so, end the northern war without waiting for a resolution in the south.

“The point is to disconnect the war Hezbollah declared on Israel from the war with Hamas,” General Yadlin said.

Several dozen people dressed mostly in black mill around damaged motorbikes and a broken fence. — Burned motorbikes in July at a Golan Heights soccer field that was hit by a rocket fired from Lebanon. The attack, part of a back-and-forth over the border between Israel and Lebanon, killed 12 people.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

The operation gives Mr. Hochstein “another tool to use when speaking with Hezbollah: ‘You better reach an agreement, or you’ll face more substantial and surprising attacks,’” General Yadlin added.

Some are more skeptical, arguing that Hezbollah is unlikely to change course, even if it has been degraded and disoriented by the attack.

Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli columnist, wrote in a commentary on Wednesday that the assault “will not prompt Hezbollah to stop its attacks on Israel’s northern civilian communities, but to escalate them.” Mr. Issacharoff added, “We appear to be in for days and possibly even weeks of escalating hostilities that might ultimately force the army to launch a ground operation, even as the army is still operating on the ground in Gaza and is still taking losses.”

Hezbollah views itself as the most influential Iranian ally in the Middle East and would try to avoid creating the perception that it had abandoned Hamas, according to Sima Shine, a former senior officer in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.

“I don’t see it happening,” said Ms. Shine, an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli research organization. “It is very important for them to be the head of all the proxies in the region, the one who gives direction to others, the one who trains others from time to time.”

More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.

The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli news media about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as Mr. Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.

“This is a very strange situation,” Ms. Shine said. It shows “such a gap between the politicians and the security establishment.”

Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

Sept. 18, 2024

Reporting from Jerusalem

Meanwhile in Gaza, the fighting continues between Israel and Hamas. Four Israeli soldiers were killed and four others severely injured in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said Wednesday. In northern Gaza, the Palestinian Civil Defense — a branch of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry — announced that two people had been killed and several others wounded in an airstrike in Gaza City. It did not say whether the victims were combatants or civilians.

Sept. 18, 2024

Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

Countries in the Middle East are sending medical aid to Lebanon amid the sudden surge in casualties. Iranian medical teams arrived in Lebanon on Wednesday to assist in treating the injured, and Iran pledged to evacuate patients with severe eye injuries to Tehran for specialized treatment, according to Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib. An Iraqi military plane carrying medical supplies also arrived in Beirut, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Credit...Fadel Itani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Sept. 18, 2024

Patrick Kingsley

Reporting from Jerusalem

Exchanges of fire along the Israel-Lebanon border continued Wednesday morning at what appeared to be their usual tempo. The Israeli military said it had conducted air and artillery strikes on several Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Sirens sounded in several villages in northern Israel, signaling rocket fire from Lebanon.

Sept. 18, 2024