The bombs detonated outside two Sunni mosques in the port city, 50 miles north of Beirut, the capital, as worshipers gathered for Friday prayers.
Lebanese television stations showed huge plumes of smoke rising from the explosion sites Friday, as bleeding victims and dead bodies were carried away from the wreckage.
The incident comes just more than a week after an explosion killed 27 people in a Shiite suburb of Beirut. That explosion was the country’s most deadly bombing since the 1980s, and analysts warned it could mark a new era of Sunni vs. Shiite retaliatory bombings that target civilians.
No one had claimed responsibility for the Tripoli bombings by Friday afternoon. In a statement, caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati blamed the “hand of criminality” for the bombings, which he described as “a clear message aimed to plant strife.”
One of the explosions targeted al-Taqwa mosque, where the Salafi cleric Salem al-Rifai preaches. Rifai survived an assassination attempt in April, when gunmen opened fire outside the mosque’s entrance.
Another bomb hit the al-Salam mosque. At both mosques, the imams escaped safely, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency, which said a total of 27 people had been killed and as many as 352 injured. Hospitals put out calls for donations of blood.
Tripoli, a poverty-stricken coastal city, has a reputation for being Lebanon’s most volatile and the one where the country’s deeply rooted sectarian fault lines are most pronounced.
Sunni gunmen regularly battle Tripoli’s small community of Alawites, who are an offshoot of the Shiite sect and co-religionists of Bashar al-Assad, president of neighboring Syria.
Since the outbreak of civil war in Syria more than two years ago, clashes between Sunnis and Alawites have grown more frequent, especially since Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah group sent troops to Syria to help Assad battle the Sunni-dominated rebels.
That decision has triggered reprisal attacks against Hezbollah from Sunni groups, which Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, blamed for last week’s Beirut bomb.
There was no way to immediately determine whether Friday’s double bombing might have been connected to the Sunni-Shiite strife.
Earlier Friday, Israel said it bombed a militant group’s base in Lebanon in response to the launching of four rockets across its northern border Thursday afternoon. It was Israel’s first airstrike inside Lebanon since its 2006 war with Hezbollah.
The target was a base belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command near the town of Naameh, just 10 miles south of Beirut, the state-run news agency reported.
The Popular Front denied involvement in the rocket attack inside Israel, for which an al-Qaeda-linked organization had claimed responsibility.
The escalation comes at a time of increased tension between Lebanon and Israel, also due in part to the entrenched Syria conflict. Hezbollah claimed responsibility last week for planting explosives that injured four Israeli soldiers near the border in early August.
In a statement, the Israeli military described the cross-border rocket attack Thursday as “a blatant breach of Israeli sovereignty that jeopardized Israeli civilian life.” An Israeli military spokesman said the pilots who carried out the retaliatory airstrike “reported direct hits on the target,” adding that, “Israel will not tolerate terrorist aggression originating from Lebanese territory.”
A journalist at the scene for Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper said the entrance to one of a series of underground tunnels belonging to the Popular Front was damaged in the raid.
Speaking to Lebanon’s state-run al-Manar television station, Abu Imad Ramez Mustafa, a Popular Front official, said he was surprised his group had been targeted when another had claimed responsibility.
On Thursday, the Lebanese branch of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an Islamist group with links to al-Qaeda, said it had carried out the rocket attack. The group, known as the Ziad al-Jarrah Battalion, is named after a Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker who was from Lebanon.
“Praise and thanks be to Allah,” read a post on a Twitter account known as an outlet for the group, which has asserted responsibility for firing rockets into Israel in the past.
Booth reported from Jerusalem.
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