Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed before the UN General Assembly several sites in the Lebanese capital of Beirut where he said Hezbollah attempted to convert ground-to-ground missiles to precision missiles.
“Israel knows what you are doing, Israel knows where you are doing it, and Israel will not let you get away with it,” Netanyahu said while holding a placard with three different sites in the Lebanese capital accusing Hezbollah of “deliberately using the innocent people of Beirut as human shields.”
In the past year; Hezbollah has been trying to build an infrastructure to convert ground-to-ground missiles to precision missiles in the Uzai neighborhood of the Lebanese capital, near the Beirut’s Hariri International Airport.
One of the sites, according to Netanyahu, is inside a football stadium belonging to the Lebanese terror group. The second site in Lebanon’s Hariri International Airport and a third some 500 meters from the airport’s landing strip in the heart of the Ma’aganah residential neighborhood close to a residential building.
According to sources, Hezbollah officials made a conscious decision to transfer the center of gravity of the precision missile project, which they have been dealing with for some time, to the civilian space in the heart of Beirut.
There are other sites in Beirut and elsewhere in which Hezbollah operatives are working in a similar attempt to establish infrastructures that will be designated for future storage and conversion of precision missiles. According to sources, Israel monitors these sites with a variety of capabilities and means and holds a great deal of information about Hezbollah’s project to build an accurate missile.
Extensive efforts of operational responses, methods, and tools, have made it so as of September 2018 there are no active factories in Lebanon that have been able to carry out an industrial-level conversion of inaccurate missiles to precision weapons for the Lebanese Shiite terror group.
Hezbollah’s project to build accurate and precise missiles, which is done using Iranian know-how, funding and guidance, has been targeted by Israel on numerous occasions in Syria most recently on September 17 when Israeli jets struck a military warehouse which held vehicles which were set to smuggle system designed to convert precision rockets from Syria to Lebanon.
During the strike a Russian reconnaissance plane was struck by Syrian anti-aircraft fire, killing 15 Russian servicemen and causing the biggest crisis between Jerusalem and Moscow in years.
Israel has reiterated its view several times on any transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah as a red line and will work to prevent any such movement. On Wednesday Netanyahu said that he managed to obtain guarantees from US President Donald Trump that Israel will be able to maintain its freedom of operation in Syria.
“I received what I asked for. I came with specific points and I got them,” he said declining to expand any further on what the demands were.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed last week that the balance of power between the Lebanese Shiite terror group and Israel has “changed” and that the group has accurate missiles which would be used in the next conflict.
“All your attempts to prevent Hezbollah from possessing accurate missiles are foiled. “We have accurate missiles that if used in any future war will change the entire equation” Nasrallah claimed during a speech via video link to Beirut’s Dahiyeh to mark Ashura.
“No matter what you do to cut the route, the matter is over and the resistance possesses precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities.”
Hezbollah’s arsenal of an estimated 130,000 rockets is comprised of mostly small, man-portable and unguided surface-to-surface rockets and missiles with ranges of between 10km-500km. The group also has several kinds of surface-to-air and land-to-sea missiles.
Israeli officials believe that the Lebanese Shiite terror group will possess over 1,000 precision-guided missiles within a decade.
Originally posted at Jerusalem Post.
