For almost a week, ophthalmologist Elias Jaradeh has worked around the clock, trying to keep up with the flood of patients whose eyes were injured when pagers and walkie-talkies exploded across Lebanon.
He has lost track of how many eye operations he has performed in multiple hospitals, surviving on two hours of sleep before starting the next operation. He has managed to save some patients’ sight, but many would never see again.
“There is no doubt that what happened was extremely tragic, when you see this overwhelming number of people with eye injures arriving at the same time to the hospital, most of them young men, but also children and young women,” he said at a Beirut hospital, struggling to hold back tears.
Photo: Iranian Presidency / WANA via Reuters
Lebanese hospitals and medics were inundated after thousands of hand-held devices belonging to the Hezbollah militant group detonated simultaneously on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, killing at least 39 people. About 3,000 more were wounded, some with life-altering disabilities.
Israel is widely believed to have been behind the attack, although it has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
Although the explosions appear to have targeted Hezbollah fighters, many of the victims were civilians, and many of those hurt in the attack suffered injuries to their hands, face and eyes because the devices received messages just before they detonated, so they were looking at the devices as they exploded.
Authorities have not said how many people lost their eyes.
Veteran and hardened Lebanese eye doctors who have dealt with the aftermath of multiple wars, civil unrest and explosions, said they have never seen anything like it.
Jaradeh, who is also a lawmaker representing south Lebanon as a reformist, said most of the patients sent to his hospital, which specializes in ophthalmology, were young people who had significant damage to one or both eyes. He said he found plastic and metal shrapnel inside some of their eyes.
Four years ago, a powerful blast tore through Beirut’s port, killing more than 200 people and wounding more than 6,000. That explosion, caused by the detonation of hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrates that had been stored unsafely at a port warehouse, blew out windows and doors for kilometers around and sent cascades of glass shards pouring onto the streets, leading to horrific injuries.
Jaradeh also treated people hurt in the port explosion, but his experience with those wounded by the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies has been so much more intense because of the sheer volume of people with eye injuries.
“Containing the shock after the Beirut port blast was, I believe, 48 hours, while we haven’t reached the period of containing the shock now,” Jaradeh said.
Jaradeh said he found it hard to dissociate his job as a doctor from his emotions in the operating theater.
“No matter what they taught you [in medical school] about distancing yourself, I think in a situation like this, it is very hard when you see the sheer numbers of wounded. This is linked to a war on Lebanon and war on humanity,” Jaradeh said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS