The Israeli military has laid bare the terrorist group Hezbollah’s latest claims that it does not run missile and munition factories in Beirut’s residential areas. The Israel Defense Forces (IFD) used terrorist militia’s own video footage of a facility in Beirut to show the machinery used in the manufacturing of rockets and warheads.
The video was taken on Hezbollah’s behest after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday gave out a weapons factory’s location in a Beirut residential area. The IDF substantiated the revelation by releasing the GPS locations of a missile factory and two weapons depots.
In response, the Iran-backed terrorist group took journalists on a tour of one of those sites. The Lebanese media aired the video footage of the staged tour. The Hezbollah handlers on the clip are seeing touting the fact that there were no missiles or weapons to be seen at the facility.
On Friday, the IDF rubbished those claims by simply pointing to the video’s backdrop, which shows various equipment used in the production of precision-guided missiles (scroll below for the IDF video). The machinery in the background was identified as cutting and rolling machines for missile’s metallic casing and others used in the making of warheads.
The guided missiles produced in this factory can hit strategic and civilian targets in Israel, media reports said. The precision-guided missiles that Hezbollah rolls out of this facility are “equipped with highly advanced navigation systems” capable of hitting “within an accuracy of a few meters,” the IDF confirmed. “With Precision Guided Missiles, Hezbollah has the ability to directly target Israeli civilians, towns, and cities.”
The Times of Israel reported IDF’s rebuttal of Hezbollah’s latest claims:
The Israel Defense Forces on Friday countered a Hezbollah claim that a Beirut factory identified by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week as a missile production site was a civilian workshop, identifying the machinery in the facility as that which is needed for the production of precision-guided munitions.
Shortly after the premier on Tuesday revealed the location of the alleged Hezbollah site in the al-Janah neighborhood of the Lebanese capital, the Iran-backed terror group led a tour of journalists to the factory, claiming it was a civilian-run affair. (…)
The military on Friday — using footage filmed by the Hezbollah-affiliated al-Mayadeen television station — identified the equipment inside the factory and explained how each piece could be used in the manufacture of missiles. (…)According to the IDF, a folding machine seen in the footage is used to work steel before it can be used to make engine casings, warheads and navigation parts; the various cutting machines are used to make stabilizing fins, engine casings and warheads; and two rolling machines are used to make engine parts, warheads and navigation parts.
The IDF also named the supposedly civilian manager of the site as a Hezbollah member, Muhammad Kamil Fuad Rimal, 32.
According to the military, Rimal indeed served as the manager of the factory on behalf of the terror group. “He was active in the unit manufacturing precision-guided missiles in cooperation with Iranian forces. As part of his role, he visited Iran a number of times, along with other operatives,” the IDF said.
In addition to the al-Janah location identified by Netanyahu, the military also revealed the location of two other alleged Hezbollah missile sites on Tuesday night — both hidden under residential areas — one in Beirut’s Chouaifet neighborhood and the other in its Laylaki neighborhood.
After 200 hundred people in Beirut were killed and thousands injured in a massive blast linked to Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian terrorist group, is keen to show that it does not hide weapons and explosives in residential areas. Those claims have once again been refuted by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli military experts.
“Hezbollah’s strategy to hide weapons and operate from civilian neighborhoods stems from its intentions to draw the IDF to target these civilian areas in times of escalation,” the IDF said in a statement on Monday. “If Hezbollah were to target Israeli civilians from these sites, the IDF would have no choice but to react—potentially placing Lebanese civilians in harm’s way—causing international outrage toward the IDF.”
Hezbollah’s stockpiling of weapons and explosives in populated areas is not limited to Beirut alone. “Hezbollah militants and arms are systematically embedded in civilian areas and urban population centers. Hundreds of arms depots, thousands of militants, and tens of thousands of rockets are distributed throughout Southern Lebanon alone, the IDF said in a past report.
The use of civilians as a human shield is a frequently used tactic by both Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Gaza-based Islamist group Hamas. The objective of these outfits is to shield their terrorist infrastructure by exploiting Israel’s humanitarian concerns when dealing with non-combatants and causing civilians casualties in times of conflict to cynically exploit them for their anti-Israel propaganda.
As Professor William A. Jacobson explained in a 2016 post: “Israel goes to extraordinary measures to comply with the laws of war, but it doesn’t matter to the media and the anti-Israel propaganda machine. Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately store and fire rockets from civilian areas for this very reason.”
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