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...
Beirut is still reeling from the August 4 explosion at its seaport—an event that’s being described as one of the largest ever non-nuclear explosions in the world and the worst disaster in Lebanon’s tragically violent history. As the Lebanese capital tends to its wounds, officials are investigating and promising to hold those responsible accountable. But citizens are understandably loathe to trust the same ruling clique whose incompetence and negligence caused this tragedy. Trending Arabic hashtags like #Prepare_the_Gallows capture their anger, which is generally directed towards Lebanese officialdom rather than just a single party or group. Some, however, are pointing their accusatory finger squarely at the militant group Hezbollah . Despite indications that the Party of God may not have been directly responsible for the incident, the group should not escape scrutiny. Suspicions that the stash of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate belonged to Hezbollah aren’t ent...
After a long and involved investigation, a U.N.-backed tribunal emerged with only a single conviction, of a minor Hezbollah figure, in the 2005 bombing that killed the former prime minister of Lebanon. Credit... Mohamed Azakir/Reuters The case went to trial in a country far from the crime scene with none of the accused in custody. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars to prosecute and employed armies of investigators, researchers and lawyers. But when the verdict on the most consequential political assassination in Lebanon’s recent history arrived on Tuesday, it left the country without a sense of closure and failed to answer even the most basic question: Who ordered the killing ? For a huge suicide car bomb attack in Beirut in 2005 that rattled the Middle East and killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Netherlands acquitted three defendants for lack of evidence. The fourth man, Salim Ayyash, was convicted ...
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