Lebanon: Professor Elias Warrak removes more eyes in one day than his entire career after devastating blasts

A surgeon has said he removed more eyeballs in one day than in his entire 25-year career after the pager attacks against Hezbollah.

Professor Elias Warrak, who works in Mount Lebanon Hospital in Beirut, was operating on injured men until 4am yesterday after the simultaneous explosions on Wednesday left 12 dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Dr Warrak said that between 60 and 70 per cent of patients he treated had at least one eye removed.

“Most of the patients were young men in their 20s,” he told the BBC.

“Unfortunately we were not able to save a lot of eyes. In some cases I had to remove both eyes. It kills me.”

Around 5,000 devices used by the terrorists for classified communications blew up in what was the first stage of a coordinated attack by “Israel” to cripple the group.

Among those maimed was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who was blinded in one eye and severely injured in the other after his pager blew up.

Following the attacks, one of Britain’s top plastic surgeons, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, posted online that he was “Beirut bound”.

The Palestinian-British doctor, who is the rector of the University of Glasgow, is being investigated by the General Medical Council after he was accused of praising terror group Hamas in social media posts.

On Thursday 20 more deaths and hundreds of injuries were reported as more devices detonated in a second wave of explosions across Lebanon and Syria. Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the University of Glasgow have been contacted for comment.