BAZOURIEH: Her head heavy with a cold, Sarah Jaffal woke up late and shuffled into the kitchen. The silence of the apartment was pierced by the unfamiliar buzzing of a pager lying near a table.
Annoyed but curious, the 21-year-old picked up the device belonging to a family member. She saw a message: “Error,” then “Press OK.”
Jaffal didn’t have time to respond. She didn't even hear the explosion.
“Suddenly everything went dark,” she said. “I felt I was in a whirlpool.” She was in and out of consciousness for hours, blood streaming from her mouth, excruciating pain in her fingertips.
At that moment on Sept. 17, 2024, thousands of pagers distributed to the Hezbollah group were blowing up in homes, offices, shops and on frontlines across Lebanon, remotely detonated by Israel. Hezbollah had been firing rockets into Israel almost daily for nearly a year in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
