IDF Destroys Hezbollah Warehouse Full of Advanced Weapons in Beirut

The Israelis have just destroyed a weapons warehouse belonging to Hezbollah, one full of advanced missiles, in the middle of southern Beirut. It was a risky mission for the IDF. The Israelis had learned — Mossad agents are all over Beirut — of a Hezbollah weapons warehouse, full of advanced missiles, located smack in the middle of a residential area in the Haniyeh neighborhood, a Hezbollah stronghold. They knew it would be a dicey undertaking given the building’s location. If they bombed it, given its location, there was the possibility of civilians being killed or wounded. And that would create still another furor about Israeli “genocide.” There would be the predictable denunciation from the usual suspects: at the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, and the Human Rights Council; at the EU, at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the Arab League, and from such moral eminences as Emmanuel Macron, Keith Starmer, Mark Carney, and the particularly odious Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland. Israeli pilots would have to hit this warehouse target dead-on, with no room for the slightest error, and to destroy both the building and its contents down to the ground, without causing damage to any of the circumjacent buildings. Civilians in nearby buildings had been warned to move at least 300 meters away from the building that had been targeted. And they did.

More on the strike on the warehouse can be found here.

A source familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post that the Trump administration was briefed before the attack occurred and “everything was coordinated.”

The Israelis got ready. They told the Americans what they were about to hit, and why. No objection was raised in Washington. The new administration fully supports Israel in its multi-front campaign against terrorist groups. Hezbollah comes in for special American fury because of its murder of 241 Marines while they were sleeping in their Beirut barracks in 1983.

The IDF struck Hezbollah infrastructure in the terror organization’s stronghold of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut, as the materials posed a significant threat to Israel, Defense Minister Israel Katz’s office confirmed on Sunday.

Israel will not allow Hezbollah to build up its capabilities and pose any threat anywhere in Lebanon,” the ministry said. “The Lebanese government bears direct responsibility for preventing these threats.”

The warehouse housed the most advanced missiles that any jihadist terror group now possesses; apparently they had been examined by Israeli agents, and when the information was conveyed to the IDF at their headquarters in Kirya, were deemed so dangerous that Israel was prepared to take the risk of possibly hitting civilians and earning still more opprobrium from the so-called “international community.”

It [the Ministry of Defense] also said Israel will insist on achieving its war objective of safely returning the residents of the North to their homes….

As long as Hezbollah insists on trying to violate its commitment, under the terms of the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, to remove all of its troops from Lebanon south of the Litani River, and thus continues to pose a threat to the 60,000 Israelis who in the early days of the war evacuated their homes in the Galilee after Hezbollah started to rain down thousands of missiles and rockets on the area, those Israelis will not return to their homes. The IDF will continue to strike at Hezbollah targets. Only when its intermittent rocket attacks on northern Israel stop completely, and the 60,000 Israelis still displaced from their homes feel safe enough to return to them, will the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon finally end. But that campaign will not end in southern Beirut, where Hezbollah keeps trying to smuggle in arms from Iran.

The attack followed an “urgent and important warning to residents of southern suburbs of Beirut,” issued by IDF Arabic Spokesperson Col. Avichay Adraee earlier.

Adraee added that those residing in a certain building located in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, as well as adjacent buildings, needed to evacuate and move at least 300 meters away for their own safety.

Civilians in the building where the missiles were being stored, and in circumjacent buildings, were given warnings, and sufficient time, to leave — and to move at least 300 meters away. As a consequence, there appear to have been no casualties after this IDF attack on the warehouse. Given its location, this was a spectacular achievement.

The building is part of Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure, the military said.

Saudi news outlet Al Hadath said the building was a warehouse, not a residence….

The Saudi claim supports the Israelis: the building was a warehouse — for weapons — and not a residence, as Hezbollah has of course been furiously claiming. Israelis, whose agents on the ground not only located the warehouse, but apparently were able to examine the weapons inside, reported on them to the IDF. The information they provided was more than enough for the IDF to conclude that these weapons were of such superior quality as to pose a real danger to the Jewish state, and therefore the risk had to be run of attacking — destroying — them. Then, with the full backing of the Americans who had been warned of the attack in advance and did not object, Israel will simply power through any attacks in diplomatic fora by the usual suspects, beginning with the kangaroo court at the UN, with Israel perennially in the dock.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called on the United States and France, as guarantors of the ceasefire agreement struck in November, to compel Israel to stop its attacks.

Israel’s continued actions in undermining stability will exacerbate tensions and place the region at real risk, threatening its security and stability,” he said in a statement.

The Lebanese president would be wise to keep quiet. He knows that the only force capable of weakening Hezbollah so that it loses its grip on Lebanon is not the Lebanese National Army, but the IDF. Hitting Hezbollah weapons depots does not “undermine” stability in Lebanon, but creates the conditions for stability to be achieved. Lebanon is safer for the Lebanese because of the IDF’s attacks on Hezbollah outposts and weapons warehouses. Aoun has always been wary of Hezbollah, and he knows that every IDF attack on Hezbollah weakens the group and strengthens the position of those many Lebanese who, like Aoun himself, want the country rid of the Shi’a terrorist group. While President Aoun obviously cannot publicly recognize that truth, he might, in all decency, simply remain silent, and let the IDF do what it must to keep Hezbollah from ever again threatening the Jewish state.