Last year, on 17 September, a pager given to a nurse named Adam received a message that alerted him and his colleagues to a disaster. The pager was distributed by Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim group, to thousands of its members, including Adam, and it was how he and his colleagues expected to be alerted of emergencies or a disaster. The pager started beeping non-stop and displayed a message that seemed to have been sent by the group’s leadership. Adam pressed two buttons to read the message, but the beeps continued. Then, suddenly, the pager exploded. Adam was hospitalized with serious injuries, including having his thumb and two fingers on his left hand blown off, his face burned and bandaged, and blinding in his right eye. He required glass eye implants and partial sight in the other eye.
Adam showed me a video of the room filmed by a colleague after he was rescued, and there was a trail of blood on the floor. He managed to crawl to the door because he had locked it while he changed his clothes.
After the blast, Adam was committed to Hezbollah and felt good when he looked at himself. In Arabic, he stated “Because we believe that the wounds are a kind of medal from God. Honouring what we go through fighting a righteous cause.”
Despite his injuries, Adam was helped by physiotherapy sessions to adapt to using what is left of his left thumb and middle finger. A picture of himself with the maimed hands, holding a pager, is now in his home. He has a tattoo on his maimed hand that expresses that his wounds were a cheap sacrifice in honour of Hassan Nasrallah, the late Hezbollah leader.
Adam is one of thousands of nurses and other medical staff employed by Hezbollah in its hospitals and health services across Lebanon.
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