Iran sent Hezbollah advanced weapons tech to turn unguided rockets into precision missiles in order to attack Israel, data obtained by Fox News indicates.
By World Israel News Staff
Just last week, Iran sent Hezbollah advanced weapons technology to turn unguided rockets into precision missiles, new flight data obtained by Fox News suggests.
American and other Western intelligence sources have long warned that Iran has been increasing its shipments of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, including Global Positioning System (GPS) parts to make unguided rockets into precision-guided missiles, Fox reported Saturday.
Iran airline Fars Air Qeshm, flight number QFZ-9950 departed Tehran International Airport on Tuesday at 9:33 a.m. local time and flew to an unknown destination, according to the data received. The Boeing 747 cargo jet landed in Damascus before continuing to Beirut, where it arrived just past 2 p.m.
The plane then departed Beirut Wednesday evening for Doha, Qatar, where it arrived just before midnight local time before returning to Tehran Thursday at 6:31 p.m., according to Fox.
The plane carried weapons components, including GPS devices to make precision-guided weapons in Iranian factories inside Lebanon, intelligence sources said. Western sources told Fox that the cargo was headed for secret Hezbollah sites near the Beirut airport in order to target Israel in the future.
This news is likely not a surprise to the Israelis. On September 27, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that Hezbollah was hiding three secret underground factories for the production of precision missiles near Beirut’s international airport. These factories were constructed with the help of Iran, Israel says.
Lebanon “is becoming a factory for precision-guided missiles that threaten Israel. These missiles pose a grave threat to Israel, and we will cannot accept this threat,” Netanyahu said in January.
Iran’s Syria presence
Ret. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, told Fox in an exclusive interview that the Iranians “are building a formidable military presence in Syria with ballistic missiles, precise ballistic missiles, UAV, air defense.”
Reiterating Israel’s many warnings that Israel will not allow Iran to have a military base in Syria, Yadlin, who served as head of Israel’s military intelligence and helped plan its strike on Syria’s nascent nuclear reactor in 2007, asserted that Israel “is not going to allow Iran to duplicate Hezbollah in Syria.”
Israel is determined “to prevent Iran from establishing a military presence in Syria and will not relent … just as we did not relent in bringing about the cancellation of the bad nuclear agreement with Iran,” Netanyahu stated at a ceremony for the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center in August.
US on board
The Lebanon-based Hezbollah has been a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department since 1997.
Iran’s Fars Air Qeshm airline has long been accused of flying arms for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the elite Quds force, Fox noted, adding that the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the IRGC and Quds force last year.
“We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” U.S. National Security adviser John Bolton said last month, according to the Associated Press.
The U.S. military has roughly 2,000 troops on the ground in Syria.