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...
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Fifteen years after the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, Hezbollah has risen to become the overarching power in a country that is now collapsing under its feet amid a series of devastating crises. A U.N.-backed tribunal on Tuesday convicted a member of the Iranian-backed group of conspiring to kill Hariri in a 2005 bombing and acquitted three others. The verdict came at a time when Lebanon’s economy has collapsed. Institutions from the security services to the presidency, occupied by a Hezbollah ally, have been found wanting, and people are struggling with the aftermath of the massive explosion that shredded central Beirut this month. Added to this, there is no functioning government and there is a spike in the COVID-19 pandemic. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has denied that the group has ever controlled Lebanese governments or that it has a majority that would allow it to act on its own. But Lebanon is sli...
Comments
Post a Comment