World
Shrugs as Hizballah Prepares Massive Civilian Deaths
by Noah Beck
Special to IPT News
March 21, 2017
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 Hizballah leader
Hassan Nasrallah recently warned Israel that his Iran-backed terror group could
attack targets producing mass Israeli casualties, including a huge ammonia
storage tank in Haifa, and a nuclear reactor in Dimona.
Also last month, Tower Magazine reported that, since the beginning of the Syrian civil
war, Iran provided Hizballah with a vast supply of
"game-changing," state-of-the art weapons, despite Israel's
occasional airstrikes against weapons convoys.
In a future conflict, Hizballah has the capacity to fire 1,500 rockets into Israel each day,
overwhelming Israel's missile defense systems. Should such a scenario
materialize, Israel will be forced to respond with unprecedented firepower
to defend its own civilians.
Hizballah's advanced weapons and the systems needed to launch them
reportedly are embedded across a staggering 10,000 locations in the
heart of more than 200 civilian towns and villages. The Israeli military has openly warned about this
Hizballah war crime and the grave threats it poses to both sides, but that
alarm generated almost no attention from the global media, the United
Nations, or other international institutions.
Like the terror group Hamas, Hizballah knows that civilian deaths at the
hands of Israel are a strategic asset, because they produce diplomatic
pressure to limit Israel's military response. Hizballah reportedly went so
far as offering reduced-price housing to Shiite families who
allowed the terrorist group to store rocket launchers in their homes.
But if the global media, the UN, human rights organizations, and other
international institutions predictably pounce on Israel after it causes
civilian casualties, why are they doing nothing to prevent them?
Hizballah's very presence in southern Lebanon is a flagrant violation of
United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, which called for the area
to be a zone "free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons"
other than the Lebanese military and the U.N. Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
The resolution also required Hizballah to be disarmed, but the terror
group today has an arsenal that rivals that of most armies. Hizballah possesses an estimated 140,000 missiles and rockets,
and reportedly now can manufacture advanced weapons in underground factories
that are impervious to aerial attack.
"Israel must stress again and again, before it happens, that these
villages [storing Hizballah weapons] have become military posts, and are
therefore legitimate targets," said Yoram Schweitzer, senior research
fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
Meir Litvak, director of Tel Aviv University's Alliance Center for
Iranian Studies, agrees, adding that global attention would "expose
Hizballah's hypocrisy in its cynical use of civilians as... human
shields."
Even a concerted campaign to showcase Hizballah's war preparation is
unlikely to change things, said Eyal Zisser,
a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and
African Studies. Hizballah exploits the fact that "the international
community is too busy and...weak to do something about it," Zisser
said. All of "these talks and reports have no meaning. See what is
happening in Syria."
Israel has targeted Hizballah-bound weapons caches in Syria twice
during the past week. Syria responded last Friday by firing a
missile carrying 200 kilograms of explosives, which Israel successfully
intercepted.
If Hizballah provokes a war, Israel can legitimately attack civilian
areas storing Hizballah arms if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) first
attempts to warn the targeted civilians to leave those areas, Litvak said.
But "it will certainly be very difficult and will look bad on
TV."
While Sunni Arab states are generally united against the Shiite
Iranian-Hizballah axis, Litvak, Zisser, and Schweitzer all agreed that
Israel could hope for no more than silent support from them when the
missiles fly.
Indeed, the "Sunni Arab street" is likely to be inflamed by
the images of civilian death and destruction caused by Israel that
international media will inevitably broadcast, further limiting support for
Israel from Iran's Sunni state foes.
Rather perversely, the Lebanese government has embraced the very
terrorist organization that could cause hundreds of thousands of Lebanese
civilian deaths by converting residential areas into war zones. "As
long as Israel occupies land and covets the natural resources of Lebanon,
and as long as the Lebanese military lacks the power to stand up to Israel,
[Hizballah's] arms are essential, in that they complement the actions of
the army and do not contradict them," President Michel Aoun told
Egyptian television last month. Hizballah, he said, "has a
complementary role to the Lebanese army."
Aoun's declaration means that Lebanon "takes full responsibility
for all of Hizballah's actions, including against Israel, and for their
consequences to Lebanon and its entire population, even though the Lebanese
government has little ability to actually control the organization's
decisions or policy," said INSS Senior Research Fellow Assaf Orion.
MK Naftali Bennett, a veteran of Israel's 2006 war with Hizballah, believes
that Lebanon's official acceptance of Hizballah and its policy of embedding
military assets inside residential areas removes any constraints on Israeli
targeting of civilian areas. "The Lebanese institutions, its
infrastructure, airport, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese Army
bases – they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out," he
said. "That's what we should already be saying to them and the world
now."
In a future war, Hizballah is certain to try bombarding Israeli civilian
communities with missile barrages. Israel, in response, will have to target
missile launchers and weapons caches surrounded by Lebanese civilians.
But it need not be so. Global attention on Hizballah's abuses by
journalists and diplomats could lead to international pressure that
ultimately reduces or even prevents civilian deaths.
Those truly concerned about civilians do not have a difficult case to
make. Hizballah has shown a callous disregard for innocent life in Syria.
It helped the Syrian regime violently suppress largely peaceful protests that
preceded the Syrian civil war in 2011. Last April, Hizballah and Syrian
army troops reportedly killed civilians attempting to flee the
Sunni-populated town of Madaya, near the Lebanese border. In 2008, its
fighters seized control of several West Beirut neighborhoods and killed innocent civilians after the Lebanese government
moved to shut down Hizballah's telecommunication network.
Hizballah terrorism has claimed civilian lives for decades, including a
1994 suicide bombing at Argentina's main Jewish center that
killed 85 people . As the IDF notes, "Since 1982, hundreds of
innocent civilians have lost their lives and thousands more have been
injured thanks to Hizballah."
If world powers and the international media genuinely care about
avoiding civilian casualties, they should be loudly condemning Hizballah's
ongoing efforts – in flagrant violation of a UN resolution – to cause
massive civilian death and destruction in Lebanon's next war with Israel.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis,
an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in
the Middle East.
Related Topics: Media
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Beck, Hassan
Nasrallah, Hizballah,
missile
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casualties, United
Nations, Yoarm
Schweitzer, INSS,
Meir
Litvak, Eyal
Zisser, IDF,
Assaf
Orion, Michel
Aoun, Media
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