Hundreds of Hezbollah members' pagers explode at a time in Lebanon

Hundreds of Hezbollah members were injured when pagers they used to communicate with each other exploded in Lebanon.

A spokesman for the group told Reuters that the explosion of the pagers was the "biggest security breach" the group had suffered in nearly a year of war with Israel.

More than 2,800 people were hurt and eight were killed in a wave of pager explosion throughout Lebanon. One of the victims was a girl. 

According to local residents interviewed by Reuters, explosions continued for half an hour after first detonations.

Click here to see videos of the aftermath of pager explosions in Lebanon. WARNING: The videos are extremely graphic! Watch at your own discretion.

The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that a large number of people with various injuries were being admitted to hospitals and called on all citizens with wireless communication devices to stay away from them, Mayadeen reports.

Later, Iran's Mehr news agency said that Iran's Ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, was injured in the detonation of a pager.

Hezbollah members rely heavily on pagers to avoid Israeli interception of their communications, military analyst Elijah Manye told Al Jazeera. He also suggested that the devices that exploded could have been hacked before being distributed to the group.

According to Iran's Mehr news agency, it was a "massive cyberattack" that Israel conducted in Lebanon and Syria.

Details

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group, led since 1992 by its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah's paramilitary wing is the Jihad Council, and its political wing is the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc party in the Lebanese Parliament. Its armed strength was assessed to be equivalent to that of a medium-sized army in 2016