IDF shows Hezbollah removing arms from exploded home
One lesson both Hezbollah and Hamas have drawn from their recent military encounters with Israel — Hezbollah in July-August 2006, Hamas in December 2008-January 2009 — is that both would benefit from increasing even more the use of the Shi’a population in southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) as human shields against the Israeli military; hiding weapons and explosives in residential buildings, however, increases the number of deadly accident, as the one which occurred in Lebanese village of Shehabiyeh last Friday
Freeze frame of Israeli surveillance video // Source: latimes.com
One lesson both Hezbollah and Hamas have drawn from their recent military encounters with Israel — Hezbollah in July-August 2006, Hamas in December 2008-January 2009 — is the using the Shi’a population in southern Lebanon (Hezbollah) and the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip (Hamas) as human shields against the Israeli military is a good strategy: If Israel tries to use its military superiority to inflict a heavy blow on these terrorist organizations, such a blow would necessarily entail a large number of civilian casualties and lead to a chorus of international condemnation of Israel. If Israel tried to minimize the number civilian casualties, its military effectiveness would diminish.
The latest example comes from Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post’s Yaakov Katz writes that new video footage released by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) on Sunday of a home in southern Lebanon where a Hezbollah arms cache accidentally exploded on Friday shows people removing long-range rockets from the structure and transferring them to alternative storage centers.
The home, in the southern Lebanese village of Shehabiyeh, exploded Friday morning. The IDF immediately dispatched an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to film the scene and defense officials said that the home was previously known to Israel as a significant arms cache used by Hezbollah fighters in the area.
The UAV footage shows a pillar of smoke rising from the home as people, likely Hezbollah operatives, close off the street below and prevent soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces from approaching the area.
In addition, the footage shows a canvas sheet spread out atop part of the roof, likely to cover up the hole of the explosion. Already Friday afternoon, despite the daylight, Hezbollah began evacuating some of the weaponry from the site, including 107 and 122 mm rockets, the mainstay of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal.
Later, at night, the evacuation picked up speed, seemingly due to a Hezbollah belief that Israel would have more difficulty detecting the illicit activity, which clearly violates UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which forbids Hezbollah from storing weaponry in southern Lebanon.
Dozens of cars and operatives are seen at the home, carrying out large amounts of weaponry and loading them into the vehicles, some of which then travel to nearby homes. Other trucks carried some of the weaponry to a mosque in Nabatieh, a town in central Lebanon, where UNIIFL is not allowed to operate.
The mosque is known to the IDF as a Hezbollah facility that is used by the guerilla organization for various, including military, activities. The assessment within the IDF’s Northern Command is that the weaponry was transferred north of the Litani River — where UNIFIL’s mandate ends — to prevent the peacekeeping forces from detecting the violation.
Katz notes that this is the third known case of a Hezbollah arms cache accidentally exploding in southern Lebanon in the past sixteen months. Last October, another home exploded in the southern Lebanese village of Tayr Filsay. IDF UAVs filmed Hezbollah operatives removing what appeared to be missiles from the homes and loading them on to a truck. Last July a Hezbollah arms cache accidentally exploded in the southern Lebanese village of Hirbet Selm. The cache was hidden inside a home in the village and contained dozens of 122mm Katyusha rockets as well as high-powered machine guns.
