Hezbollah has doubled the arsenal of advanced guided missiles it keeps trained on Israel in the past year, the leader of the Lebanese Shia militants has claimed.
Hassan Nasrallah told a pro-Hezbollah television station that its precision-guided missiles could hit anywhere in Israel and the occupied territories. The four-hour interview was an attempt to lift morale among the group’s followers after the most disastrous year for Lebanon since the civil war.
The collapse of the economy and the explosion at the port of Beirut in August, which destroyed large parts of the city, have brought contempt and hostility for the major political factions. Hezbollah, whose support is concentrated in the Shia communities of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, was once almost immune to broader popular opinion but has in latter years played an active, some say dominant, role in government.
Hezbollah has had to stand by and watch as Israel has repeatedly bombarded staging posts on its supply lines from Iran through Syria. Early on Christmas Day, jets, presumed to be Israeli and flying low over Beirut, fired missiles that hit one of the key bases in Syria used by Iran for weapons development.
Although such attacks are not new, the fact that the missiles were visible as they were fired from Beirut may have been a deliberate warning to the city’s residents, who are only too aware of Hezbollah’s heavy presence in the suburbs.
Read the article by Richard Spencer in The Australian (from The Times).