IDF: Hezbollah killed four Lebanese who linked terror group to 2020 Beirut blast

Two journalists and two customs officers have been killed over the last eight years.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF revealed Tuesday that a special unit in Hezbollah assassinated four Lebanese citizens who linked the terror group to the massive Beirut port explosion in August 2020 that killed 218 people and injured more than 7,000.

In a post on X, Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee said Unit 121 had eliminated two customs officials and two journalists.

One of them, Joseph Skaff, who headed the Customs Department at the port, was thrown off the roof of a tall building three years before the blast after requesting that the terror organization remove tons of ammonium nitrate it had been improperly storing at the docks.

Ammonium nitrate is a chemical used in mining and quarrying, and is also a key ingredient in fertilizers. While normally safe, it can explode if it becomes contaminated or is kept near heat or in a poorly ventilated storage area.

It can also be made into a homemade bomb when mixed with fuel.

In one of the most infamous terrorist attacks on American soil, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used a truck bomb made of approximately 2,200 kg. (4,800 lbs) of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with nitromethane and diesel fuel to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.

The head of the department’s anti-smuggling unit, Mounir Abu Rjeili, was stabbed to death four months after the disaster.

He had provided information to the authorities about Hezbollah’s culpability in the explosion.

Also in December, photographer Joe Bejjani, who was among the first on the scene documenting the  blast, was shot to death in his car.

The Lebanese army had asked for his help to investigate what had happened.

The last to die was Lokman Slim, an anti-Hezbollah journalist and political activist who was similarly shot dead in his vehicle in February 2021 after having publicly accused both Hezbollah and the Assad government of being responsible for the widespread death and destruction.

Hezbollah had a history of seeking ammonium nitrate, according to media reports at the time, although the Iranian proxy denied all connection with the blast – and the case has never made it to court.

It has also consistently denied any link to the deaths of any of its critics, including the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in Beirut in 2005 along with 22 other people when explosives hidden in a van were detonated as his motorcade passed by.

His death was widely attributed to Hezbollah at the time.

Adraee pointed out that the investigations into all these murders had never been completed and that the IDF knew of “a long list” of other such cases.

Hezbollah has long held power in Lebanon by virtue of its armed forces, paid for and directed by Iran.

Even now, although badly weakened by the IDF, it is managing to hold off the government’s stated determination to strip it of its weapons in order to comply with the conditions of the cease-fire attained last year with Israel, which echoed the UN resolution that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Lebanese civilians are turning against Hezbollah, Adraee wrote at the end of his post, and the IDF appears determined to encourage the trend.

“In parallel to the actions the IDF is taking against the organization’s attempts to rebuild itself, it will continue to expose Hezbollah’s brutal actions against the Lebanese public,” the IDF spokesman wrote.