(Bloomberg) -- Iran is treating scores of people wounded in pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon that targeted its key ally Hezbollah.
The Islamic Republic, which helped found Hezbollah in the early 1980s and turned it into its most formidable regional proxy force, dispatched eight eye specialists and a team of nurses to Beirut earlier this week, Iran’s health minister Mohammadreza Zafarghandi told the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
In a speech on Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah thanked Iran for also sending a plane to the Lebanese capital to transfer dozens of people wounded after thousands of rigged communications devices exploded.
The head of Iran’s Red Crescent said on Wednesday that 95 people had been flown to Tehran for treatment.
Both Iran and Lebanon have said Israel is responsible for orchestrating the attacks and embedded explosives inside the devices. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group by the US and European Union.
At least 37 people, the majority of them Hezbollah operatives, were killed and more than 2,900 others were wounded in the explosions, according to tallies by some Israeli and Lebanese media outlets. Two children were also killed in the blasts, and Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said that at least three children are being treated in Tehran.
“The number of eye injuries vastly exceeds the capacity of hospitals and medical crews in the country,” Nisreen Al-Ashqar, head of the Arab Union for Optometry Professions, told reporters in Beirut on Thursday.
She added that ophthalmologists across the Middle East have expressed their readiness to help.
So far Iran appears to be the fastest to mobilize. Iranian media outlets showed videos and photos of an aircraft transporting the wounded, many of them suffering eye injuries, to Tehran.
In one image released on Friday, President Masoud Pezeshkian is seen at the bedside of one of those being treated at the Farabi Eye Hospital in Tehran.
The day before, General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees the operations of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in the region, was shown in a video clip visiting a Lebanese child lying in a hospital bed with a bandage over one eye.
Iranian officials are also among those wounded, underscoring the close relationship between Tehran and Hezbollah officials.
Among them are Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who underwent “a small operation,” according to a post shared on X by Iran’s embassy in Beirut. The son of a senior cleric in charge of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s religious offices in Lebanon was also seriously injured in the eyes and face, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency.
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