Hamas…Israel Conflict Day 344…Part 1….More things blow-up in Lebanon……

“There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Mortada Smaoui, 30, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, said after a series of simultaneous explosions hit his neighborhood. He said that firefighters and soldiers were rushing to the scene.

The chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Salah Zeineddine, said that Lebanese authorities had put the hospital’s staff on standby following reports of a new round of explosions.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group backed by Iran, had blamed Israel for the initial attack on Tuesday. That assessment was confirmed by U.S. and other officials who said Israel had planted explosives in at least hundreds of pagers. Israel, which has waged a long covert war against Iran and its allies, has declined to publicly comment on the attack.

Here’s what else to know:

• Taiwanese company: Israel hid tiny explosives inside a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported to Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation. The Taiwanese company some of the officials named as the supplier, Gold Apollo, on Wednesday sought to distance itself from the devices, saying that another manufacturer with a Hungarian address had made the model of pager targeted in the attack as part of a licensing deal.

• Thousands injured: Lebanese officials on Wednesday raised the death toll from the day before to 12 people, including two children, and said that nearly 2,800 people were injured. Hezbollah said at least eight of its fighters were among those killed. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, was injured by an exploding pager, and he was evacuated to Tehran for treatment, according to two members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps briefed on the attack.

• A child’s funeral: Mourners gathered in the village of Saraain for the funeral of the youngest confirmed victim of the pager attack: 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah. They chanted as they made their way through cemetery: “They killed our child Fatima!”

• Hezbollah’s pagers targeted: Three officials briefed on the Tuesday attack said that the operation targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted. The use of pagers became even more widespread after the Oct. 7 attacks, when Hezbollah’s chief warned that Israeli intelligence had penetrated the cellphone network, security experts said.

• Covert operations: Israel has carried out a series of clandestine attacks against Iran and its allies as part of a yearslong shadow war. Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist and deputy defense minister, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in 2020 using an A.I.-assisted robot controlled remotely via satellite. In February, Israel blew up two major gas pipelines in Iran, disrupting service to several cities, and, in 2021, an Israeli hack of Iran’s oil ministryservers disrupted gasoline distribution nationwide….

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