Image source, Reuters

We've just been hearing from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, as the pair are meeting in Cairo to discuss efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.

The explosions in Lebanon were not mentioned in either politician's speech, but after being asked by the press about Egypt's response, Abdelatty says Cairo stands in complete solidarity with Lebanon.

Abdelatty also warns that more attacks could lead to a regional war, and he condemns any action that targets Lebanon's sovereignty. Egypt is "very concerned" with stopping any future escalation, he adds.

He says that Israeli aggression in Gaza is "at the heart of this crisis" and says a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war would decrease further escalation.

Image source, Reuters

The previously sporadic fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the politically-influential Shia Muslim organisation which controls the most powerful armed force in Lebanon, escalated on 8 October 2023 - the day after Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza.

The militant group began firing at Israeli positions and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have retaliated, using air strikes and tank and artillery fire against Hezbollah positions in Lebanon.

Since then, Lebanon's health ministry says at least 589 people have been killed. Most of them have been members of Hezbollah, but at least 137 were civilians, according to the ministry.

In Israel, authorities say at least 25 civilians and 21 soldiers have been killed as a direct result of cross-border attacks.

Almost 200,000 people have also been displaced on both sides of the border.

Despite the fighting, observers say that up until now both sides have aimed to contain hostilities without crossing the line into full-scale war.

Fears the situation could spiral soared after the killing of 12 children in a rocket attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on 27 July. Israel said Hezbollah carried out the attack, but the group denied involvement.

On 30 July, the IDF announced that it had killed senior Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in an air strike in Beirut's southern suburbs.

As we've been reporting, nearly 3,000 people in Lebanon were injured on Tuesday while 14 are believed to have been wounded in neighbouring Syria.

The Lebanese health ministry confirmed blasts in Beirut while the UK-based watchdog Syrian Observatory of Human Rights has confirmed explosions in Syria's capital Damascus.

A source told AFP news agency that the son of Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar and the daughter of a Hezbollah member in the Bekaa Valley, in the east of Lebanon, were among those killed.

Overall, the Lebanese health minister says 750 were injured in the south of Lebanon, and around 1,750 in the Beirut area.

Carine Torbey
BBC Arabic, Beirut Correspondent

• Warning: This post contains graphic details

Professor Elias Warrak, an ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University Hospital in Beirut, tells me that Tuesday afternoon was like a "nightmare".

He says he had to remove more eyes than he has in his whole 25-year career.

"It was very hard," he says. "Most of the patients were young men in their twenties and in some cases I had to remove both eyes."

Daniel De Simone and Mohamed Madi
Reporting from Jerusalem

• Warning: This post contains graphic details

Some more detail now from that news conference from the Lebanese health minister.

Abiad says 750 were injured in the south of Lebanon, and around 1,750 in the Beirut area.

About 10% of the total were in critical condition, some of them in intensive care. Many have facial injuries and had to be put on ventilation.

In total, around 100 hospitals took in patients. So far, around 460 surgeries have been performed, with the majority being either on the eyes, face, or "extremities", particularly the hands.

There have been amputations, including of fingers and hands.

Image source, Reuters

Lebanon may have to send some of the injured abroad to receive specialised treatment.

Speaking after visiting the wounded in hospital on Wednesday, Health Minister Firass Abiad says that 2,750 people remain in hospital after the detonation of hundreds of pagers.

He adds that some of the injured have been moved to Iran and Syria to be treated, but 98% of the wounded will continue to be treated inside the country.

Lebanon's Health Minister Firass Abiad says 12 people have been killed, including an eight-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy.

Speaking at a news conference, Abiad adds that healthcare workers were among those killed in the pager explosions that detonated across the country yesterday.

In a few minutes, we're due to hear an update from the Lebanese health ministry about yesterday's explosions.

We'll be bringing you the latest lines. Stick with us.

A tactical triumph for Israel, but Hezbollah won't be deterredpublished at 10:55 British Summer Time 18 September

10:55 BST 18 September

Jeremy Bowen
International Editor

Israel has scored a significant tactical triumph in this operation – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller. And undoubtedly it’s a humiliation for Hezbollah, which will increase its insecurity and be bad for morale.

However there is a potentially serious strategic downside for Israel.

Because while this humiliates the powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, it doesn’t deter them.

And it doesn’t get closer to Israel’s strategic aim of stopping Hezbollah’s attacks and allowing the more than 60,000 Israelis on the northern border who haven’t been in their houses for nearly a year to return home.

The Israelis have used an important, audacious weapon, which is clearly very effective in their terms.

But this attack does not take the region one inch further back from all out war: it pushes it closer.

Hezbollah will be reeling from the attack. But it will rapidly compose itself as an organisation and will find another way to communicate. Lebanon is a small country and messages can easily be carried by hand.

Undoubtedly, Hezbollah and its allies in Iran, whose ambassador to Beirut was wounded in the attack, will be licking their wounds at the moment.

But once again the region has been pushed right to the brink of an all-out war. Sooner or later, they will fall over the cliff if this continues.

Image source, Reuter

Let's bring you some reaction from world leaders and some European governments starting with Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman who says Tuesday's attack in "friendly" Lebanon "represents a serious challenge to international law".

Maria Zakharova adds "the organisers of this high-technology attack purposefully sought to inflame large-scale armed confrontation seeking to provoke a big war in the Middle East".

Elsewhere, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed his sadness over the attack during a phone call with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, according to Turkey's state-run news agency Anadolu.

Ireland's deputy premier says he considers the explosions to be a breach of the Geneva Convention.

"This is a new form of warfare, I think we have to be extremely worried and concerned about that and the international community needs to reflect on the nature of the attack," Micheál Martin told reporters in Dublin.

Some fresh reaction now from inside Lebanon.

The Minister of Culture, Mohammad Wissam Al-Murtada, has said in response to yesterday's attacks that his country's "victory" over Israel is imminent.

In a statement on X, he says there are no limits to Israel's evil and yesterday proved its "hostility to humanity".

We've not yet had a statement from the Israeli military, who have been engaged in cross-border fire with Hezbollah for months.

As our cyber correspondent Joe Tidy just reported, pagers are much harder to track than mobile phones.

Sources told Reuters that Hezbollah had, as early as last year, begun to suspect that Israel was tracking their phones.

So by February this year, fighters were banned from using their phones when they were carrying out operations.

Senior Hezbollah politicians also avoided bringing phones to meetings, and the group's leader warned that phones were more dangerous than Israeli spies.

In a televised speech, Hassan Nasrallah told supporters to break, bury or lock their phones in an iron box.

Instead they decided to use pagers. But one analyst says Hezbollah's mobile phone warning to its supporters had been far too public.

"Hezbollah essentially broadcast to the world that they were downgrading from cell phones to pagers," Joseph Steinberg, author of Cybersecurity for Dummies, told Reuters.

"You're essentially telling the adversary and any other adversaries, of which Hezbollah has many, what type of technologies you're looking to acquire."

Joe Tidy
Cyber correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

Until yesterday, pagers were something of a forgotten technology.

They used to be a regular sight in hospitals and with emergency services but are now rarely talked about, after being usurped in the 2000s by mobile phones.

These low-tech boxes about the size of a cigarette packet are usually attached to belt buckles for quick reference.

They work by syncing up with high powered transmitters - you don’t need many of them to cover a large area, unlike mobile phone masts.

Pagers are always listening for new messages being sent out on their frequency and most pagers can only receive information - they emit no signals themselves.

This is why Hezbollah reportedly favoured them over mobile phones, as pager users can not be located through GPS or other means.

When a pager receives a message, it beeps and vibrates and a short bit of text is displayed - usually asking the receiver to call the person back or go to a location.

A plane carrying medical supplies for hospitals in Lebanon has arrived in its capital Beirut this morning.

The shipment from Iraq contains some 15 tonnes of medicine and supplies.

Lebanon's health minister, Firass Abiad, says a second plane, carrying 70 tonnes of medicine and supplies, is due to arrive later, according to a report by the Iraqi News Agency.

Elsewhere, volunteers from the Iranian Red Crescent Society, a non-governmental humanitarian organisation, have also arrived in Lebanon.

The group from the Red Crescent Relief and Treatment Team includes 12 general and specialised doctors and 12 nurses and paramedics, a statement from the Iranian embassy says on X.

It comes as hospitals in Lebanon continue to struggle to help the more than 2,000 people wounded on Tuesday, some of whom were left blinded, while others have needed amputations.

Image source, Reuters

As unexploded pagers are examined, all signs point to Mossadpublished at 09:52 British Summer Time 18 September

09:52 BST 18 September

Frank Gardner
Security correspondent

Explosives experts say a number of Hezbollah’s pagers have been recovered intact - ie, those that did not go off, and these are now being forensically exploited for clues.

The investigative trail involves at least six places, possibly more. There is Lebanon and Syria, where the pagers exploded, Iran, which supplies Hezbollah and whose ambassador in Beirut was injured in the blasts.

Then there is Taiwan, where the pagers were initially thought to have come directly from, since they bore the logo of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. But now the trail leads to Hungary where they are believed to have been produced.

Finally, there is Israel, the one country whose overseas intelligence agency Mossad, is thought to know exactly how this all happened.

Although Israel is not commenting, there is no other state or organisation that has both the technical capability and the intent to inflict such a serious blow to Hezbollah, and indirectly to its backers in Iran.

Israel also has form. In 1996 its domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet assassinated a leading Hamas bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, by sabotaging his mobile phone which blew up, killing him instantly.

Yolande Knell
Middle East correspondent, in Jerusalem

Already fears were running high of a new escalation between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s leaders have been threatening to step up military action to return thousands of displaced citizens from the north of the country to their homes after nearly a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

Now, Hezbollah has threatened retaliation for the latest dramatic, wide-scale attack.

While Israel’s military has declined to comment, international media quote unnamed US and Lebanese sources saying that Israeli operatives hid small amounts of explosive material within a new batch of pagers imported into Lebanon.

This morning, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is in Egypt to discuss Gaza ceasefire talks.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it attacked a building where a number of Hezbollah members were last night.

In a post on X, it says its forces "identified a number of terrorists from the Hezbollah terrorist organization" who were "operating in a military structure" near the southern Lebanon village of Majdal Salem.

"Closing a circle from the air, fighter jets attacked the building where the terrorists were operating."

IDF warplanes also attacked Hezbollah buildings in five areas of southern Lebanon, the statement adds.

As a reminder, the Israeli military have declined to comment on the thousands of pagers that detonated across Lebanon on Tuesday afternoon.

Image source, Reuters

As we've been reporting, a number of people died and thousands more were injured when pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded on Tuesday. Here's the latest:

• A senior Lebanese security source and another source tells Reuters that Mossad - the Israeli spy agency - planted a small number of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Hezbollah
• Separately, Israeli and US sources have told Axios and Al-Monitor that the explosions were detonated early after fears Hezbollah had learnt about the plan. The sources suggest the idea had been for this to form the opening move for an "all-out" offensive
• The founder of that Taiwanese firm has denied any involvement with the explosions. It comes after images of pagers were posted on social media - which appeared to indicate they could have been made by the Taiwan-based Gold Apollo Company Ltd
• Hezbollah, as well as Lebanon's prime minister, are blaming Israel for the attack. The Israeli military have declined to comment
• The Iranian ambassador to Beirut was one of those injured yesterday afternoon. His wife has since said he is doing well

A BBC team in Taipei has just been to the offices of Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese firm that's found itself in the spotlight following these explosions.

Police officers are still inside the premises, as they continue to question staff and examine documents.

In the meantime, a pretty sizeable media scrum has developed outside.

As we reported earlier, Gold Apollo's founder denied his company had anything to do with the explosions in Lebanon.

Hsu Ching-Kuang said his company had signed an agreement three years ago with a Hungary-based company called BAC. He said it gave the company the right to use Gold Apollo's logo but nothing else.

Image source, Joy Chiang/BBC

As we reported earlier, the exploding pagers seemed to have a Taiwanese brand - although the Taiwanese firm says the pagers aren't theirs.

Now, Taiwan's economy ministry says there is "no record of direct export to Lebanon".

Taking questions from the media in Taiwan, the ministry says the Gold Apollo company exported 260,000 pagers from 2022 up until August of this year - mainly to Europe and the United States.

"Those products do not have potential of explosion as reported by the media," the ministry adds.

"The company is doubtful that the product belongs to them after reviewing the photos from media and judged the pagers were likely modified after export."