Surviving the Pager Massacre

On September 17 and 18, 2024, the Zionist entity carried out a mass-maiming attack against the larger resistance community by detonating thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies widely used by civilians and military personnel in Lebanon and parts of Syria.  

Successive waves of explosions terrorized homes, markets, and crowded streets, places of worship, workplaces, and Hezbollah party centers — carnage extending across time and space. Thirty-nine people were martyred and more than 2,750 wounded.

The widely dispersed supply chain attack, which wounded thousands, was described as unprecedented in the history of warfare. Hands, eyes, faces, abdomens: These were the targets.

For the survivors, the journey toward recovery has stretched across  months and years and may last decades. Some have resumed their lives or returned to the battlefield, while others were later martyred in Israeli attacks that have persisted in brazen violation of the ceasefire.

Many survivors have had to undergo multiple surgeries and courses of treatment, often here and in Iran, in the midst of war and displacement, abandoned by the Lebanese state and institutions responsible for their care. They share this fate of abandonment with entire communities harmed by Israeli aggression across Lebanon.

To this day, many of the wounded struggle to reclaim and remake their lives under new circumstances, finding meaning in their wounds through the long arc of martyrdom, resistance, and liberation.

In this photo essay, we present the stories of six survivors — Mohammad Abed, Khalil Nasrallah, Assi Zeineddine, Hussein Dheini, Rawan al-Moussawi, and Zeinab Mestrah. We compiled their accounts from extensive interviews conducted in several photo studios across Dahieh, the South, and the Bekaa between July and September 2025.

What follows is an attempt to move beyond statements, investigations, and analyses — to return to what lies behind the traumatic event and read through the scars: what the injury has stolen, what the wound could not take, and the longing for martyrdom it carries.

Each account is an experience of survival and poses a question of its own:

How do visions foretell fate?
How does the resistance fighter see his Creator with an eye fallen from its socket?
How does a maimed man forge his loss into certitude? 

How does wounded motherhood heal?
How does a child reconcile with a home that no longer feels safe?
How does love stitch a colonial wound?