Hezbollah can keep all weapons, rules new Lebanese government

Members of Lebanon’s Parliament signaled that  Hezbollah terrorists would be given free rein to continue threatening the Jewish state under the Lebanese government.

By Associated Press and World Israel News Staff

Prime Minister Saad Hariri began a parliamentary meeting in Lebanon on Tuesday by declaring that Lebanese citizens have the right to “resist Israeli occupation and repel its aggression,” which represents an official green light for the Hezbollah terror group with regard to retaining its massive stockpile of conventional weapons, rockets, and missiles.

Hezbollah receives massive amounts of aid each year from Iran, which are used to purchase weapons and train a terror army that is one of the powerful militaries in the region. Hezbollah also operates a vast international narcotic trafficking and money laundering operation to finance its terror activities.

In violation of the terms that ended the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, the terror group has amassed around 150,000 rockets and missiles and was recently caught building a network of cross-border attack tunnels that infiltrated Israeli territory.

After the new government was announced in Lebanon late last month, breaking a nine-month deadlock that had deepened Lebanon’s economic woes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented to a group of visiting United Nations diplomats, “Iran has proxies. One of them is Hezbollah. Hezbollah just joined the government of Lebanon. That’s a misnomer; they actually control the government of Lebanon. It means that Iran controls the government of Lebanon.”

In addition to the pronouncement regarding right to “resist Israeli occupation,” the Lebanese government called for reforms in state finances, the economy and the crumbling electricity sector, which cost state coffers about $2 billion a year.