BEIRUT: Hundreds of people, including many Hezbollah members, were seriously wounded across Lebanon when the handheld pagers they use to communicate exploded, security sources have told Al Jazeera.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the detonations on Tuesday killed two of its fighters and a girl, and said it was carrying out an investigation to determine the causes of the blasts.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the explosion of the pagers was the "biggest security breach” the group has experienced in nearly a year of almost daily cross-border fire with Israel.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured by the pager explosions, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said it appears the devices were hacked and detonated in a coordinated attack, which represented a "major development” in the hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group.
"This is a major security breach. Hezbollah’s communications device has been compromised. We have seen pictures from across Lebanon of men lying on the floor wounded, and bleeding. We have seen reports of hospitals asking for blood,” she said.
She said "near simultaneous explosions” were reported in southern Lebanon, in the east of the country and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where there was widespread panic.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had called on his fighters a few months ago to stop using smartphones because Israel has the technology to infiltrate those devices, Khodr said.
"So now they’ve resorted to this different communications system using pagers, and it seems they have been penetrated,” she said.
Elijah Magnier, an independent military and political analyst, said Hezbollah relies heavily on pagers to prevent Israel from intercepting its communications, and he speculated that the pagers would have had to have been tampered with before being distributed to Hezbollah members.
"This is not a new system. It has been used in the past, … so in this case, there has been involvement of a third party … to allow access …to remotely activate the explosions,” he told Al Jazeera.
"These explosions … are powerful enough to [severely] hit the psychology of Hezbollah.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Israel announced theexpansion of its official war aimsto include enabling Israelis who have fled areas near the Lebanese border to return to their homes, widening its nearly yearlong fight against Hamas in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah.
The exchanges of fire between the Israeli military and Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon have forced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border to flee their homes.
"The political-security cabinet updated the goals of the war this evening, so that they include the following section: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement early on Tuesday.
The exchanges of fire between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah have killed hundreds of people, mostly fighters, in Lebanon and dozens of civilians and soldiers on the Israeli side.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said "military action” was the "only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities”.
Hezbollah claimed a dozen attacks on Israeli positions on Monday and three more on Tuesday.