After two waves of explosions of communication devices on Tuesday and Wednesday, psychosis is taking hold among the Lebanese population. Rightly so?
Simultaneous explosions of pagers on Tuesday, others of walkie-talkies on Wednesday. The toll on Thursday was at least 37 dead and more than 3,500 injured, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, including France 24 echoed. While members of Hezbollah were initially targeted by these explosions, which have so far been attributed to Israel, other people who were not part of the movement were also injured or even killed. Among them were children.
Since then, psychosis has taken hold among the Lebanese population. Many fear that their phones, batteries and solar panels will explode in turn. “I don’t dare hold my phone in my hands anymore. Before, I would put it next to me to sleep, but now, I don’t dare anymore,” Mona confides to RFI.
Panic on social networks
“What happened in the last two days is scary, it’s surreal. It feels like we’re living a video game,” Lina told AFP, whose BFMTV echoes. “We all put our phones in an isolated room,” adds the woman who admits to having even unplugged the solar panels that supply her home with electricity. And social networks are not helping to calm the fears of the population. Images of solar panels and other destroyed electronic objects are circulating, without it being known whether they exploded by themselves or were simply victims of the explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies.
The Lebanese government, for its part, is trying to call for calm. “There are a lot of rumors, an intercom exploded, a solar energy system exploded, a television exploded, a smartphone exploded…” estimated with Reuters the caretaker government’s information minister, adding: “There are a lot of lies, a lot of fake news and it doesn’t help at all.” But the trauma is powerful.
“We wonder what the next step will be.”
“Many attacks are at eye level,” notes Dr. Elie Gharios to RFI, who is worried about the future: “With the spiral of violence we are witnessing, we wonder what the next step will be.”
On Thursday, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah accused Israel of “crossing all red lines” and warned the Jewish state that it would receive “a terrible punishment and a just retribution, where it expects it and where it does not expect it,” suggesting that a response was already being prepared.