Hezb’Allah Stores Weapons At Beirut Airport

Workers at Beirut Airport have reported on “unusual boxes” arriving at the airport from Iran since November, and have seen Hezb’Allah officials at the airport, overseeing their handling. It was not Israel, but these workers who revealed that Hezb’Allah weapons were being stored at the airport, making clear their anxiety about having to work next to an obvious target for Israeli airstrikes, should war break out. They told their story to British journalists for The Telegraph. In order to disprove these claims, Lebanese officials have been providing foreign journalists and diplomats with tours of the airport. More on these efforts to deceive the world can be found here:

Lebanese officials offered journalists and ambassadors tours of Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport in an attempt to refute claims, made by the British newspaper The Telegraph, that this site was acting as a storage facility for weapons, according to international media reports from earlier this week.

Lebanese Foreign Affairs Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, Public Works and Transport Minister Ali Hamieh, Tourism Minister Walid Nassar, and Information Minister Ziad Makary all participated in the tours.

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Habib reportedly claimed that “the airport is safe and that these rumors are part of Israel’s attempts to justify its attacks on Lebanon,” according to LBC International.

Israel has no need of any further “justification” for attacking Hezbollah. It is enough that Hezbollah’s almost-daily barrages of rockets launched into northern Israel have forced 80,000 Israelis to leave their homes in the north, unable to return until such time as Hezbollah stops those barrages.

“With this article [in The Telegraph], we’ve gone from [Israeli] airspace violations to a psychological war through written articles,” Hamieh claimed, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“And now we’ve shown the falsehood of those articles,” he told the group. “They are silly articles.”…

Yes, nothing shows the “falsehood” of claims about Hezbollah storing weapons at Beirut Airport than providing a “we-have-nothing-to-hide” tour to journalists, in which the main cargo center at the airport is completely off-limits to those visitors, as are other unspecified areas in the airport. By preventing journalists from entering the main cargo center, Lebanese officials have proved the very opposite of what they had claimed: they do have something to hide.

“Beirut airport security prevented journalists from entering the cargo center at the airport,” Al-Hadath journalist Ghinwa Yateem reported after the tour concluded. The journalist also claimed that Lebanese officials “did not let us film or enter certain areas.”

So much for Lebanon’s claim to “open wide” the Beirut Airport for inspection by foreign journalists,, to prove there were no Hezbollah weapons stored there. The inspection was a farce, for the place where those weapons were most likely to have been warehoused was the main cargo center of the airport, which remained strictly off limits. “Nothing to hide” apparently meant for the Lebanese officials that “we have nothing to hide from you in the places we allow you to visit. Furthermore, the journalists were not allowed to film inside the airport, and not just the cargo center, but other parts of the airport were also off-limits, according to Saudi journalist Ghinwa Yateem.

Additionally, reporters were shown a nearly empty warehouse which is supposedly responsible for holding 20% of the import traffic, according to the Algemeiner….

Why would a warehouse which ordinarily holds 20% of the imports coming into Beirut Airport suddenly be “nearly empty”? The explanation is simple: this must have been one of the places where Hezbollah had stored its weapons, and the airport authorities quickly emptied out that warehouse before the foreigners — journalists, ambassadors — from a dozen countries arrived to inspect.

One worker told the Telegraph that in November “unusual” boxes arrived from Iran and that a high-ranking Hezbollah official was overseeing the customs shipments.

So whom shall we believe? The airport workers who observed “unusual” boxes arriving at the Beirut Airport from Iran, and saw a high -ranking Hezbollah official overseeing customs matters for those shipments, or the Lebanese officials who insist there are no Hezbollah weapons stored anywhere at the airport? They have provided journalists and diplomats with “we-have-nothing-to-hide “ tours of the airport, but they have prevented those visitors from entering the main cargo center. Instead, they were shown a warehouse that ordinarily contains 20% of the imports coming into Lebanon, but when they saw it, it was almost empty, as if its contents had been quickly removed.

The farcical tours of the Beirut Airport have fooled no one. The Lebanese would have done better to limit their response to The Telegraph’s story about Hezbollah’s weapons stored at the airport to a one-sentence denial (“there are not now, and never have been, any weapons stored at the Beirut Airport”) and skipped the tour of the airport, which merely confirmed, in the most convincing way, that the airport did indeed have something to hide.