Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday lauded French President Emmanuel Macron for his leadership in the wake of last week’s massive blast at the Beirut port.
The two leaders spoke in a phone call, during which Netanyhu “expressed Israel’s willingness to give humanitarian aid” to the Lebanese population, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.
During the call, Netanyahu also called for the removal of Hezbollah missiles and explosive materials from populated areas. “In order to prevent disasters like the one that occurred at Beirut port, the explosives and missiles that Hezbollah has hidden must be removed from all concentrations of civilian population in Lebanon,” he said.
“The prime minister clarified that if Hezbollah thinks they can solve the crisis in Lebanon by creating a crisis with Israel, this is a big mistake,” the PMO statement said.
In a 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu detailed sites in Beirut where he said Hezbollah concealed weaponry, including close to the water front.
Preliminary evidence released by Lebanese officials indicates that the explosion was connected to 2,750 metric tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate which was left unsupervised in the port for some six years.
Hezbollah has previous connections to ammonium nitrate, including incidents in Germany and the UK, both widely reported at the time, in which its agents were reportedly found with substantial quantities of the material. In London in 2015, following a Mossad tip off, British intelligence reportedly found four Hezbollah operatives with 3 tons of ammonium nitrate held in flour sacks. A similar process led to the discovery in Germany of Hezbollah operatives with enough ammonium nitrate “to blow up a city,” an Israeli TV report said Friday.
Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah gives a speech in the aftermath of a deadly explosion in Beirut, on Friday August 7, 2020 (al-Manar screenshot)
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, in a 2016 speech, threatened to fire missiles at an Israeli ammonia storage tank in the northern port city of Haifa. “Lebanon has a ‘nuclear bomb’ today,” Nasrallah said in the speech. “The idea is that some of our missiles, combined with the ammonia in Haifa, will create the effect of an atom bomb.” (The tank has since been emptied out.) READ MORE
