As flawed policies and unprecedented crises have plunged Lebanon into its worst economic crisis since the civil war, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah announced on Sunday that his party now has twice as many precision-guided missiles as it had a year ago.
In an end-of-year interview with the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV, Hassan Nasrallah said that, for the past year, his party has doubled the number of its precision missiles to strike anywhere in Israel and occupied Palestinian territories, stressing that Israel’s efforts to prevent it from acquiring the missiles have failed.
So during the same time, Lebanese residents are going hungry due to the collapsing economy, thrusting more than half the population under the poverty level, Hezbollah has been working on perfecting the power of his party’s precision-guided missiles.
“When Israel threatened through a U.S. official to target a Hezbollah facility in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region, we warned them that we would retaliate for any such attack,” Nasrallah said.
In 2019, Israel accused Hezbollah of setting up a factory for precision-guided missiles in the Bekaa valley.
According to Reuters, the Israeli military said that Hezbollah, with Iranian assistance, had been bringing specialized equipment to a weapons factory near the Bekaa village in order to set up a production line for precision-guidance missiles.
However, Nasrallah is refuting Israel’s allegations, saying during the four-hour interview that there are many matters related to his party that Israel has no knowledge of because they are kept in a “very tight circle.”
Nasrallah also mentioned that the last few weeks of the administration of US President Donald Trump are critical and must be treated with care. He referred to Trump as “angry” and “crazy.”
When discussing the up and coming US administration of president-elect Joe Biden, Nasrallah noted that Iran would not negotiate with the US on behalf of its allies or discuss conflicts in the region.
He said Tehran would talk with Washington only about the Iranian nuclear deal.
Sitting with a picture of Qassem Suleimani to his left, Nasrallah repeatedly vowed that Iran and its supporters will avenge the US killing of the commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Quds Force, in a drone attack a year ago in Iraq.
“That revenge is coming no matter how long it takes,” he told Al-Mayadeen TV.
