In the afternoon of Tuesday, September 22 a massive explosion took place in the town of Ain Qana in southern Lebanon, at a house being used as a Hezbollah arms store. Residents of the town, which lies around 50 km south of Beirut in an area with strong ties to the militant group, were the first to raise concerns that the building was being used by Hezbollah to store weapons. Then a security source told Reuters: “The explosion occurred as a result of a technical error in one of the party’s weapons warehouses.” The sheer scale of the blast and the amount of billowing black smoke at first led many to assume it had been a gas station explosion. Video footage posted on social media showed the destruction of neighboring houses and the burnt-out surrounding land. Hezbollah operatives surrounded the area and blocked both passersby and journalists from approaching the scene. According to the National News Agency, the explosion occurred at the same time as Israeli warplanes and intelligenc...
It is not clear whether the messages being sent out by Iran’s influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vis-a-vis Lebanon are the outcome of Tehran’s confidence in its ability to preserve its grip on the country’s politics – through its proxy Hezbollah – or whether they stem from panic over its inability to escape accountability . What is terrifyingly astonishing, however, is not just the Iranian leaders’ decision this week to use the fatal explosions in the Port of Beirut more than 10 days ago to try and increase their influence, but also the fact that they do not view Hezbollah’s alleged stocking of dangerous munitions at the port to be a problem at all. Other regional powers, meanwhile, are observing the economic and political crisis unfolding in Lebanon either with a sense of helplessness or with seemingly little care for the plight of its people. The Trump administration remains preoccupied with the US presidential election in November. It u...
"Hezbollah controls security at the Beirut port, which it uses for its smuggling operations and for storing weapons. The assessment in Lebanon is that the investigation of the massive explosion at the port on Aug. 4 will be a whitewash, and that responsibility for the disaster will be laid on junior government officials." "The leaks from the investigation so far do not touch on the claims that Hezbollah turned the port into a weapons warehouse and had actually seized the ammonium nitrate stockpiled there to create explosive devices (IEDs). In 2015, a Hezbollah warehouse storing 8.3 tons of ammonium nitrate was discovered in Cyprus, and six months later, three tons of ammonium nitrate were found in four London hideouts. “On top of the risk of accidental detonations that threaten residential neighborhoods, it was revealed that the charge used in the Burgas bus bombing in 2012 contained ammonium nitrate,” according to one report ." "Nor is it mentione...
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