The Day the Pagers Exploded

An intimate account of the 2024 Lebanon war, written by a father, husband, and doctor, offering a profound sense of the existential uncertainty together with the ordinary day-to-day dimensions of war

"The Day the Pagers Exploded is a defiant act of narration. It is a Palestinian-Lebanese doctor sitting down, in the middle of a war, and refusing utterly to leave his story for someone else to tell it."—susan abulhawa, author of Mornings in Jenin

On 17 September 2024, more than 3,000 handheld pagers were detonated simultaneously among Lebanese civilians, in what became the opening strike for a war launched by Israel.

This latest round of war by Israel on Lebanon would last seventy-one days, and this book is the first personal account of the conflict from Lebanon. Written as a diary from the viewpoint of a Lebanese-Australian medical doctor who returned to Lebanon in 2023 after living all his adult life overseas, it covers the initial hectic days following the pager attacks, progressing to the systematic bombing of Beirut and the population displacement and complete obliteration of the southern Lebanese towns and villages.

In this day-by-day account, Hicham Cheikh Hassan paints the atmosphere in Beirut and Lebanon as the war unfolded. As a medical doctor, he was exposed to the effects of Israel bombing residential areas, and as a father and husband, he tried to determine what was best for his young family. The Day the Pagers Exploded also covers the complete split between the unfolding reality on the ground and the discourse at the political level along with the information chosen to be portrayed in Western mainstream media.