Simultaneous blasts of the devices hit locations in several Hezbollah bastions across Lebanon, with the health ministry reporting nine killed and some 2,800 others wounded.
Hezbollah blamed Israel after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges of fire in stated support of Palestinian ally Hamas whose October 7 attack triggered the Gaza war.
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At one hospital in Beirut's southern suburbs, an AFP correspondent saw people being treated in a car park on thin mattresses, with medical gloves on the ground and ambulance stretchers covered in blood.
At another hospital in the area, the correspondent saw one person wounded in the face, eye and hand, and another on the side of his waist, with a third person being treated in a car.
"In all my life I've never seen someone walking on the street... and then explode," said Musa, a resident of Beirut's southern suburbs, requesting to be identified only by his first name.
"My wife and I were going to the doctor, I found people lying on the ground in front of me," he said.
"People didn't know what was happening."
The sudden and widespread blasts sparked chaotic scenes across the country, and gruesome videos and images circulated on social media, including people bloodied and wounded at waist level where a pager might be kept, or on their arms, hands and face.
One video, which AFP was unable to independently verify, showed people in a vegetable shop when a blast appeared to come from a man's side, with people scattering and the man falling to the ground.
One witness, requesting anonymity, told AFP he saw a Hezbollah member's pager explode immediately after he received a message on the device.
Under tent structures set up under a bridge in Beirut's southern suburbs, dozens of people crowded to give blood at a hastily set-up donation point as the intermittent sound of ambulance sirens rang out, another AFP correspondent said.
Mostly men were coming to give blood, with full bags lined up on a table and then packed into cold boxes.
Elsewhere in the capital's Hamra commercial district, an AFP journalist saw dozens of people crowded around the entry to one of the city's main hospitals as ambulances rushed to the facility.
On the street near the emergency department, women, some wearing black chadors, and men crowded around and trying to find out news of the wounded.
Some cried or shouted in anger or exasperation and others held their heads in their hands.
One woman was informed by phone that a relative had lost a hand and was wounded in the waist.
Sirens continued to ring out as ambulances kept arriving, some from Lebanon's civil defence or the Red Cross but also other emergency services including the Risala Scout association, which is affiliated with Hezbollah ally the Amal movement.
Soldiers and people in civilian clothing tried to help facilitate the passage of the vehicles, while emergency workers wearing bright vests directed some of the ambulances.
In Lebanon's south, closer to the Israeli border, an AFP correspondent reported dozens of ambulances rushing between the cities of Tyre and Sidon, with hospitals in both cities cordoned off.
An AFP correspondent in eastern Lebanon said dozens of people were wounded in similar incidents in the Bekaa Valley.
