Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at exploding Hezbollah devices, Meta banning Russian state media, and an attack on military sites in Mali.

Ticking Time Bombs

More than a dozen people were killed and around 2,800 others, including many Hezbollah members, were wounded across Lebanon and parts of Syria on Tuesday when the pagers they used to communicate exploded almost simultaneously. This was the “biggest security breach” that Hezbollah has faced since the Israel-Hamas war began nearly a year ago, a Hezbollah official told Reuters.

Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said some hospitals have already reached full capacity, with most victims reporting wounds to the face, hands, or stomach. Security forces have urged locals to stay off the roads to allow passage for ambulances, and Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry has placed hospitals on “maximum alert,” appealing for blood donations and calling on health care workers to head to their places of work immediately. Anyone with pagers was instructed to throw them away.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the detonations, and the militant group vowed retribution. Israel has declined to comment. U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the United States was not involved in the apparent attack and had no advance knowledge of it. He would not speculate on who might be responsible, saying the Biden administration was “gathering information” on the incident.

Top Israeli security officials convened an emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss options for addressing the escalating situation with Hezbollah. Hours earlier, Israel’s security cabinet announced that countering Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel and ensuring the safe return of its 60,000 residents were official war goals. The only way to do this is through “military action,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Monday. More than 100,000 people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have been displaced since near-daily tit-for-tat attacks began last October.

Hezbollah announced on Tuesday that it is investigating the cause of the explosions. A Hezbollah official told the Wall Street Journal that malware could have caused the devices to heat up and explode. The pagers were reportedly called a few seconds before they detonated to potentially increase the likelihood that someone would pick up the device and be maximally wounded.

Among those injured included Mojtaba Amani, Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, though he said in a phone call after the incident that he was “feeling well and fully conscious.” Tehran backs both Hezbollah and Hamas in their fight against Israel and has attacked Israel directly. Of the nearly 3,000 people injured, roughly 200 were critically wounded, meaning they required surgery. Nine of those killed were in Lebanon, and seven were in Syria. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was reportedly unharmed.

Israel’s Shin Bet security agency also said on Tuesday that it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior defense official in the coming days. This was the third time that a Hezbollah explosive device was discovered in Israel in the past two years. Israeli authorities did not name the targeted official.

Today’s Most Read

Why Don’t Younger Americans Vote? by Julian E. Zelizer
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Netanyahu Is Playing Into Khamenei’s Hands by Dennis Ross

What We’re Following

Meta bans Russian media. Meta—the U.S. corporation that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—announced late Monday that it was banning Russian state media outlets from its social media platforms to help counter alleged Russian foreign influence campaigns.

The Kremlin and Russian media denounced the move on Tuesday. “Don’t worry, where they close a door, and then a window, our ‘partisans’ (or in your parlance, guerrilla fighters) will find the cracks to crawl through,” RT said in a statement. Meta’s decision came just days after the United States announced new sanctions on RT for reportedly aiding the Russian military in its fight against Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the Russian military to add 180,000 active troops, which would bring the number of active service members to 1.5 million and the total number of military personnel to 2.38 million. The decree, to take effect on Dec. 1, would give Russia the second-largest army in the world after China. Beijing has just over 2 million active-duty personnel. (The United States has more than 1.3 million active-duty service members.)

This is the third time that Putin has expanded the army’s ranks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and it comes as Moscow is trying to reinvigorate its fight along Ukraine’s eastern border while also tackling Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Expanding the military is “due to the number of threats that exist to our country along the perimeter of our borders,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.

Democratic backsliding. Last year saw the largest decline in a global index of free and fair elections in almost 50 years, according to a new report published on Tuesday by International IDEA, a Stockholm-based intergovernmental democracy watchdog. Shrinking voter turnout and increased rates of contesting results have hindered election credibility, the report said. 2023 was the eighth consecutive year of global democratic backsliding.

Of 158 countries surveyed, 47 percent have experienced a decline in key democratic indicators over the past five years. Notable deteriorations were seen in Africa’s Sahel region—where Niger, Gabon, and Burkina Faso faced coups or coup attempts in 2023—as well as several countries in Central and South America, such as Guatemala, Peru, and Uruguay.

The watchdog also said that recent assassination attempts have heightened risks to democratic elections. On Monday, former U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that “inflammatory language” by Democrats provoked the two apparent assassination attempts against him, including one on Sunday outside a golf course in Florida. No motive has yet been officially announced in either case.

Extremist attack. Malian authorities said insurgents attacked two military sites in the capital of Bamako on Tuesday. Gunshots were heard in several neighborhoods, and a local airport was temporarily closed. The al Qaeda-linked group Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin claimed responsibility.

This was the first time since 2015 that an extremist attack occurred in the country’s capital. Army chief Oumar Diarra said the “complex attack” is now under control and the threat has been neutralized. It is unclear how many people were killed, and at least 15 suspects were arrested.

“Today, Mali finds itself at the center of overlapping civil wars involving separatists, ethnic militias, jihadis, and international actors,” John A. Lechner, Sergey Eledinov, and Adam Sandor wrote in Foreign Policy this month. Foreign intervention has only worsened regional tensions, though, as both Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group and Western powers vie for influence there.

Odds and Ends

Hundreds of mostly young Germans galloped their trusty steeds around an arena this weekend to compete in traditional horse-riding events, such as time jumping, style jumping, and dressage. The twist? The arena was a gymnasium, and their steeds were, in fact, wooden stick horses. The athletes were competing in Germany’s first hobby horse championship, a pastime that grew from a grassroots phenomenon in Finland and has since gained popularity worldwide. There are now more than 5,000 active athletes and more than 200 clubs across Germany alone.