BEIRUT: Doctors in Lebanon spoke Wednesday of horrific eye injuries and finger amputations, a day after Hezbollah paging devices exploded across the country, killing 12 people and wounding up to 2,800.
“The injuries were mainly to the eyes and hands, with finger amputations, shrapnel in the eyes — some people lost their sight,” said doctor Joelle Khadra, who was working in emergency at Beirut’s Hotel-Dieu hospital.
Hundreds of wireless paging devices belonging to members of the Iran-backed group exploded simultaneously on Tuesday, hours after Israel said it was broadening the aims of the Gaza war to include its fight against Hamas’s Lebanese ally.
Khadra told AFP that Hotel-Dieu, located in the Lebanese capital’s Christian-majority Ashrafieh district, treated about 80 injured.
Around 20 “were admitted to intensive care immediately and were put on ventilators to ensure they wouldn’t suffocate due to the swelling in their faces,” she said.
“The rest are going one after the other to the operating room. Today, we have 55 surgeries,” she added, wearing her white doctor’s coat over her blue scrubs.
Hezbollah, which has traded near daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces in support of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has vowed to retaliate for the pager blasts, which it blamed on Israel.
Israel has not yet comment on the explosions, which went off in Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, from Beirut’s southern suburbs to Lebanon’s south and in the east near the Syrian border.
A doctor at another hospital in Beirut said he worked all night and that the injuries were “out of this world — never seen anything like it.”
“It’s beyond what can be described,” he said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized by the hospital to speak to the media.
“We have a lot of injuries with amputated fingers” because people were holding the pagers in one or both hands, he said, while some people who had been sitting on the floor also had wounded feet.
But the “most devastating” wounds were when the pagers blew up in people’s faces, he said, citing up to 40 patients with eye injuries, most of them severe.
Around three-quarters of those patients “lost one eye completely, and the other eye is either somewhat salvageable or barely salvageable,” he said, while “15 to 20 percent... lost both eyes in a way that’s irreparable.”
“A lot of colleagues have been saying this is worse compared to the August 4... (eye) injuries that we saw,” he said.
On August 4, 2020, a catastrophic explosion at Beirut’s port killed more than 220 people and injured some 6,500, with several hundred at least suffering ocular injuries and some people even blinded in one eye by flying shards of glass and other debris.
The doctor also reported “a lot of burns and foreign bodies — metallic pieces of pagers being retrieved from patients’ eyes, brains, faces, sinuses, from their insides, from their bones.”
He said there was “a lot of tissue loss, fingers lost — things that we can’t repair, we can’t replace.”
Health Minister Firass Abiad said Wednesday that two children were among 12 people killed, while almost 300 people were “in critical condition,” some suffering facial injuries and brain haemorrhaging.
Of some 1,800 people who were admitted to hospital, “460 needed operations on their eyes, face or limbs, particularly the hands,” he said, noting “multiple finger or hand amputations.”
Lebanon, enduring a grinding five-year economic crisis, received a delivery of medical aid from Iraq on Wednesday morning, while doctors and nurses from Iran’s Red Crescent also arrived to assist, Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported, and Jordan said it sent aid and medical supplies.
The office of the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon said on X that “praise must go to the medical corps and emergency professionals,” adding the importance of their work after the pager blasts “cannot be overstated.”
Lebanon doctors tell of horror after pager blasts
https://arab.news/52pnu
Lebanon doctors tell of horror after pager blasts
- “The injuries were mainly to the eyes and hands, with finger amputations, shrapnel in the eyes,” said doctor Joelle Khadra
- A doctor at another hospital in Beirut said he worked all night and that the injuries were “out of this world — never seen anything like it“
After Ocalan visit, Turkiye opposition MPs brief speaker, far-right leader
ISTANBUL: A delegation from Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish opposition DEM party met Thursday with the parliamentary speaker and far-right MHP leader amid tentative efforts to resume dialogue between Ankara and the banned PKK militant group. DEM’s three-person delegation met with Speaker Numan Kurtulmus and then with MHP leader Devlet Bahceli.
The aim was to brief them on a rare weekend meeting with Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party who is serving life without parole on Imrali prison island near Istanbul.
It was the Ocalan’s first political visit in almost a decade and follows an easing of tension between Ankara and the PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil and is proscribed by Washington and Brussels as a terror group.
The visit took place two months after Bahceli extended a surprise olive branch to Ocalan, inviting him to parliament to disband the PKK and saying he should be given the “right to hope” in remarks understood to moot a possible early release.
Backed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the tentative opening came a month before Syrian rebels began a lightning 12-day offensive that ousted Bashar Assad in a move which has forced Turkiye’s concerns about the Kurdish issue into the headlines.
During Saturday’s meeting with DEM lawmakers Sirri Sureyya Onder and Pervin Buldan, Ocalan said he had “the competence and determination to make a positive contribution to the new paradigm started by Mr.Bahceli and Mr.Erdogan.”
Onder and Buldan then “began a round of meetings with the parliamentary parties” and were joined on Thursday by Ahmet Turk, 82, a veteran Kurdish politician with a long history of involvement in efforts to resolve the Kurdish issue.
Iraq’s Sulaimaniyah city bans groups accused of PKK links
SULAIMANIYAH: Authorities in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah have banned four organizations accused of affiliation with the Turkish-blacklisted Kurdistan Workers Party, activists said Thursday, denouncing the move as “political.”
The four organizations include two feminist groups and a media production house, according to the METRO center for press freedoms which organized a news conference in Sulaimaniyah to criticize the decision.
PKK fighters have several positions in Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan region, which also hosts Turkish military bases used to strike Kurdish insurgents.
Ankara and Washington both deem the PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency in Turkiye, a terrorist organization.
Authorities in Sulaimaniyah, the Iraqi Kurdistan region’s second city, have been accused of leniency toward PKK activities.
But the Iraqi federal authorities in Baghdad have recently sharpened their tone against the Turkish Kurdish insurgents.
Col. Salam Abdel Khaleq, the spokesman for the Kurdish Asayesh security forces in Sulaimaniyah, told AFP that the bans came “after a decision from the Iraqi judiciary and as a result of the expiration of the licenses” of these groups.
Israeli military says commandos raided missile plant in Syria in September
JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said on Thursday its special forces raided an underground missile production site in Syria in September that it said was primed to produce hundreds of precision missiles for use against Israel by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The complex near Masyaf, in Hama province close to the Mediterranean coast, was “the flagship of Iranian manufacturing efforts in our region,” Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told a briefing with reporters.
“This facility was designed to manufacture hundreds of strategic missiles per year from start to finish, for Hezbollah to use in their aerial attacks on Israel,” he said.
He said the plant, dug into the side of a mountain, had been under observation by Israeli intelligence since construction work began in 2017 and was on the point of being able to manufacture precision-guided long-range missiles, some of them with a range of up to 300 km (190 miles).
“This ability was becoming active, so we’re talking about an immediate threat,” he said.
Details of the Sept. 8 raid have been reported in the Israeli media in recent days but Shoshani said this was the first confirmation by the military, which usually does not comment on special forces operations of this type.
At the time, Syrian state media said at least 16 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the west of the country.
Shoshani said the hours-long nighttime raid was “one of the more complex operations the IDF has done in recent years.” Accompanied by airstrikes, it involved dozens of aircraft and around 100 helicopter-borne troops, who located weapons and seized documents, he said.
“At the end of the raid, the troops dismantled the facility, including the machines and the manufacturing equipment themselves,” he said, adding that dismantling the plant was “key to ensure the safety of Israel.”
Israeli officials have accused the former Syrian government of President Bahar Assad of helping the Lebanese-based Hezbollah movement receive arms from Iran and say they are determined to stop the flow of weapons into Lebanon.
As Bashar Assad’s government crumbled toward the end of last year, Israel launched a series of strikes against Syrian military infrastructure and weapons manufacturing sites to ensure they did not fall into the hands of its enemies.
Israel says struck Hezbollah rocket launchers in south Lebanon
- Israeli military said Thursday’s strike targeted medium-range rocket launchers in the Nabatieh area
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah rocket launchers in south Lebanon on Thursday, despite a fragile ceasefire with the militant group.
The truce, which took effect on November 27, has been marked by mutual accusations of violations from both sides.
The Israeli military said Thursday’s strike targeted medium-range rocket launchers in the Nabatieh area.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported at least three Israeli strikes in the area.
“Prior to the strike a request was sent to the Lebanese armed forces to neutralize the launchers that posed a threat to Israeli civilians and... troops,” the military said in a statement.
“The launchers were struck only after the request was not addressed by the Lebanese armed forces.”
Under the terms of the ceasefire, the Lebanese army is to deploy alongside UN peacekeepers in the south as the Israeli army withdraws over a 60-day period.
Hezbollah is to withdraw its forces north of the Litani River — some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the border — and dismantle its military infrastructure in the south.
In late December, the UN peacekeeping force expressed concern at the “continuing” damage done by Israeli forces in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, the Israeli military insisted it was acting to remove any threat to Israel “in accordance with the ceasefire understandings.”
