Doctor says he has ‘never had to remove more eyes’ amid pager attack

Surgeons in Lebanon have exposed the litany of horrific injuries they have witnessed among the almost 3,000 people whose pagers exploded in a suspected Israeli attack on members of Hezbollah. The pagers, believed to have been booby-trapped by Israel’s Mossad spy agency prior to their delivery earlier this year, detonated yesterday after receiving a coded message.

The devices vibrated and beeped for several seconds prior to the explosion, a feature that experts say was likely designed by the aggressor to ensure the owner was holding the device so as to cause maximum damage. Dozens of targets sustained severe facial injuries, with doctors explaining how they were forced to cut out victims’ eyeballs. Others had their hands blown off, or suffered gaping wounds in their abdomen had they concealed the pager on their hip.

Professor Elias Warrak, an ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University Hospital in Beirut, told the BBC he had never had to remove so many eyes in his 25-year-career, describing the experience as a ‘nightmare’. ‘Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes,’ he said, adding that he operated until 4am Wednesday morning and still had more patients to treat when he returned a few hours later.

At least 12 people are confirmed dead, including at least two children – one girl aged eight and an 11-year-old boy – according to Lebanese Health Minister Firas Abiad. Journalists were not allowed to enter hospital rooms or film patients in the wake of the attacks. But a torrent of images and footage shared to social media by onlookers showed all manner of grievous injuries. Health Minister Abiad said the wounded had been sent to various hospitals to avoid any single facility being overloaded and added that Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Egypt offered to help treat the patients, given the number of casualties.

One young girl, named as Fatima Abdullah, was killed when she picked up the beeping pager with the intention of giving it to her father. Tragic scenes showed crowds gathering for her funeral, holding her flower-adorned coffin aloft before laying her to rest earlier today. The crippling security breach is believed to be the result of a shady operation stretching from Hungary to Taiwan that was masterminded by Israel ‘s foreign spy agency.

It is alleged that Mossad, working in collaboration with elements of Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF), managed to infiltrate the supply chain and plant a small quantity of high explosives inside the communication devices before they were delivered to Lebanon some time this spring. These rigged devices were subsequently distributed to thousands of unsuspecting members across the political, military, operational and medical branches of Hezbollah before they were eventually detonated on Tuesday afternoon. Officials in Jerusalem have thus far declined to comment on the incident, but Hezbollah has placed the blame squarely on Israel and has vowed to punish it.

An American official speaking on condition of anonymity said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the attack, but gave no more details. Meanwhile, a slew of security sources, regional analysts and munitions experts concur that Mossad and the IDF are the only entities capable of pulling off such an operation. Just one day after Hamas’ October 7 attacks that triggered the war in Gaza, Lebanon’s Hezbollah entered the fray in support of its ally and began trading strikes with Israel along their shared border. Since then, hundreds of the group’s operatives have been killed in targeted Israeli strikes on Lebanon, including several senior commander and a top Hamas official in Beirut.

Fearing that the phones used by Hezbollah members to communicate presented a massive security risk, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in February declared the devices were ‘more dangerous than Israeli spies’ and his officials began drawing up plans to address gaps in the group’s intelligence infrastructure.

In a televised speech on February 13, Nasrallah sternly ordered his followers and supporters to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box. The group opted to replace the phones its members had previously used to communicate with pagers – one way receivers that are more secure than smartphones and do not operate on the same network. They also have an extremely long battery life, with some models able to last up to three months on one charge – a key advantage given Lebanon’s economic crisis and unreliable electricity supply.

A Lebanese security source confirmed to Reuters that Hezbollah placed an order for thousands of pagers in February with a Taiwan-based company called Gold Apollo. The AR-924 pager ordered by Hezbollah is advertised a ‘rugged’ device allowing users to securely communicate in messages of 100 characters. But Gold Apollo said in a statement on Wednesday that it did not manufacture the devices delivered to Lebanon, claiming instead they were manufactured by in Budapest, Hungary, by another entity called BAC Consulting Kft under a brand licensing deal.

Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang (pictured) said: ‘The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,’ with an official statement from the company adding: ‘Apollo Gold Corporation has established a long-term private label authorisation and regional agency cooperation with BAC… but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC.’ An executive of BAC Consulting Kft confirmed to NBC in a phonecall that the company worked with Gold Apollo but said ‘I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediary’, before hanging up. This is where the trail has gone cold – for now.

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