BEIRUT (The Thursday Times) — The Lebanese army has seized what it called a large quantity of weapons and ammunition from a warehouse in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Hezbollah’s main stronghold, in a rare raid on the area as the state presses its drive to bring all arms under its control.
The army’s intelligence directorate raided the depot in the Musharrafieh neighbourhood after “precise monitoring and tracking” of arms transfers and trafficking, the army command said in a statement on Friday. Troops arrested a Lebanese man, identified only by the initials A.A., who is being questioned under the supervision of the judiciary.
The army did not say who owned the weapons, give their type or number, or link them to any group. Photographs it released show rifles and pistols laid out in rows on the ground beside boxes of ammunition, magazines, and belts of machine-gun rounds. The warehouse owner, from a family in the nearby Chiyah district, went into hiding after the raid, Lebanese media reported.
A dealer’s stock?
Mustafa al-Asaad, a military affairs analyst who studied the army’s photographs, said the haul looked more like the stock of an experienced arms dealer than preparations for fighting, and that it was unlikely to have come from Iranian shipments to Lebanon. He said several pistols, including beige Glock models, resembled weapons issued to Iraqi security forces and might have been smuggled in from Iraq through Syria, though only their serial numbers could settle that. A gold-plated Kalashnikov in the cache suggested the dealer also sold to collectors, he said.
Fadi Daoud, a retired brigadier general, said the raid carried “a dual message: domestically, that weapons fall exclusively under state authority, and internationally, that the army is serious and capable”. He said no party could be blamed before the investigation was finished, and warned that storing ammunition in such a crowded district put residents in danger.
Lebanon’s government banned Hezbollah’s military and security activities on March 2, after the group claimed rocket fire towards Israel, ordered it to hand its weapons to the state, and told the army to press on with its plan to bring weapons north of the Litani River under state control. In June, Lebanon and Israel signed a framework agreement that included Hezbollah’s disarmament, a gradual Israeli withdrawal from land it holds in the south, and the deployment of the Lebanese army there. Hezbollah says it will not give up its arms while Israeli forces remain in Lebanon and their attacks continue.
The raid came days before the US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, is due in Beirut for talks on what will replace UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, whose mandate ends on December 31.
