By Hwaida Saad and Ben Hubbard

BEIRUT — In the waiting rooms of a Beirut hospital, exhausted families slumped on couches, waited anxiously for doctors’ updates and wept. Nearby rooms held their loved ones, injured when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah suddenly exploded across Lebanon this week, blinding and maiming many of their owners.

“I have no hope,” said a woman whose son-in-law had lost an eye and fingers on both hands. He had been lying down when his pager beeped and he picked it up — only for it to blow up in his face.

She gave only her first name, Joumana, and would not say what her son-in-law did that required a pager. But she made a vow: “The only revenge that will get us justice is to get rid of Israel.”

Across Lebanon on Thursday (19), hospitals were packed and people were on edge after hand-held communications devices imported by Hezbollah, the militant group and political party, blew up in waves across the country on two successive days. Dozens of people were killed and thousands of others injured in attacks that spread a terror that simple objects carried in people’s bags and pockets could readily become bombs.

Lebanese, US and other government officials have said that Israel launched the attacks by remotely detonating devices that had been outfitted with explosives before they were sent to Hezbollah. Israeli officials have not confirmed or denied their country’s involvement.

For 11 months, Hezbollah has been attacking sites in northern Israel in support of its ally Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel has responded by bombing and assassinating Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, and civilians have fled areas on both sides of the border.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry on Thursday raised the death toll from the attacks Tuesday (17) and Wednesday (18) to 37, adding that nearly 3,000 people had been wounded.

Hezbollah did not release figures on how many of its members were killed or injured, but the devices were distributed solely to its people, and multiple interviews with officials and relatives suggested that most of the victims were connected to the group, although some were civilians or had noncombat roles in the organization.

Hezbollah publicly mourned many of the dead as its fighters, including one teenager, born in 2008, who was 15 or 16. At least two other children, a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, were among the dead, as was at least one woman.

The precise identities and affiliations of the wounded were less clear. Journalists were barred from entering some hospitals to interview victims, and the covert nature of Hezbollah’s military activities means that its members don’t readily share information with outsiders.

Hezbollah is a vast organization, that Israel, the United States, and other countries consider a terrorist group. It has a military force estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters, as well as offices that provide social services, administer schools and serve the group’s ministers and lawmakers in the Lebanese government.

The attacks appeared to cut through a broad swath of that apparatus, raising questions about whether such an assault violated the laws of war.

“It was an indiscriminate attack,” Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told reporters Thursday, after describing the burden the attacks had put on Lebanon’s health system. “It was a war crime.”

The laws of war prohibit booby traps in everyday items, said Lama Fakih, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, including “something like a pager that a kid could easily pick up when it starts beeping.”

Combatants must also differentiate between fighters and civilians, something an attacking power cannot do with so many explosives moving freely around such a large area, Fakih said.

And detonating such explosives in urban communities risked harming nearby civilians and possibly exposing those with no ties to Hezbollah to future attacks. Fakih mentioned the case of a man who had lost an eye because he had been passing someone on the street whose pager exploded.

Appearing to be affiliated with Hezbollah meant “you could be targeted at any time,” she said.

After two days of explosions, many in Lebanon were anxious Thursday about what might blow up next. Public institutions banned pagers, the Lebanese army collected and detonated suspicious devices, and the civil aviation authority forbade airline passengers from travelling with pagers and walkie-talkies.

At the American University of Beirut hospital, two floors held people who had been injured in the attacks.

One man wiped away tears, saying that his 30-year-old nephew had “almost lost his whole face.”

Dr Mohammed Ghobris, a surgeon from southern Lebanon, said he had received dozens of patients wounded by the exploding pagers after the first blasts Tuesday. Now, he was in Beirut, where his brother-in-law, Sajid Ghobris, awoke to find that he was missing an eye and that one of his hands had been amputated at the wrist.

“This is international terrorism,” Mohammed Ghobris said. Three other relatives of his had also been injured.

In a televised speech Thursday, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the attacks had been “a severe and cruel blow” to the organization. He vowed that Hezbollah would continue to prevent Israelis who have been displaced from the border region from returning home.

“No military escalation, no killings, no assassinations and no all-out war can return residents to the border,” he said.

As he spoke, an Israeli jet screamed through the sky over Beirut, setting off sonic booms, further terrifying residents.

Earlier in the day, crowds had gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway, for a second day of funerals for those killed in the attacks.

A woman named Hanan said that it was the second funeral she had attended in two days and that four of her relatives were in the hospital as a result of the attacks. They included her sister-in-law, who she said had been injured when her husband’s pager blew up.

“There are fighters and nonfighters,” she said. “There are people who were civilian staff in hospitals.”

Nearby, Ali Bazzi watched pallbearers carry the coffin of his nephew, Abbas Bazzi.

“This enemy has no mercy, no pity,” he said.

When asked how his nephew had died, he said, “From the pager.”

-New York Times