Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed Iran has been building a runway that slices through forested mountains just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Israel's northern border. Gallant displayed satellite photographs that he said showed the site, where the Iranian national flag and the flag of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group could be seen.
Gallant said Iran “is planning to act against the citizens of Israel," using the runway as a base. A spokesperson for Hezbollah declined to comment on Israeli accusations.
The location of the runway was near the hilly Lebanese city of Jezzin, across the border from the Israeli town of Metulla. Hezbollah earlier this year invited journalists to watch a military exercise in a nearby town in southern Lebanon. Gallant said that the site could accommodate mid-sized aircraft. The location he gave was near the Lebanese village of Birket Jabbour and city of Jezzin, some 20 km (12 miles) north of the Israeli border town of Metulla.
Satellite images from Planet Labs Inc. from July 28 showed work on a 1.2 kilometer (3,937-foot) runway with four hangars constructed on a tarmac just east of the runway. Satellite images from January showed the runway largely unpaved.
Tensions have recently mounted in the Hezbollah-controlled south of Lebanon. The legitimate Lebanese Army has largely been absent or rendered ineffective in that part of the country south of the Litani River since the mid-1960s when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was granted freedom of action against Israel. While Arab countries, including Syria and Jordan, had muzzled or crushed any Palestinian liberation activities from their soil, only tiny Lebanon was pressured (Cairo Accord, 1969) by the coward Arabs to remain an open war front against Israel. Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and others funded the PLO with money and weapons to fight the Lebanese government and its army, leading to the Lebanese-Palestinian war of 1975.
When the PLO was evicted from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion of 1982, Syria and Iran immediately created the Iranian militia Hezbollah to replace the PLO in keeping the Lebanese state and army out of south Lebanon and promoting so-called "resistance" against Israel. Despite the presence of a UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) since 1978, the Israeli-Lebanese border remains a lawless area from which the Lebanese state and army are excluded. Hezbollah occasionally sends its own operatives and affiliated Palestinian militias to harass Israel under the pretense of "resistance". The UN has been largely incompetent and ineffective, as it hasn't prevented Hezbollah from acting with impugnity, nor has it prevented Israel from retaliating, nor has it been able to allow the Lebanese state and army to recover a semblance of sovereingty over their territory. UNIFIL in fact no longer trusts the Lebanese army which has been reduced to serve as a puppet and cover for the Iranian terrorist militia.
Earlier this year, a Hezbollah operative infiltrated into Israel from Lebanon and detonated a bomb that severely wounded an Israeli citizen. Hezbollah has also allowed Palestinian militant factions to operate in its strongholds and fire rocket barrages toward Israel this past spring.
Without providing details, Gallant said Hezbollah could use the runway as a launching pad for large weaponized drones built off of Iranian blueprints. The airport could also be used to transport materiel from nearby Syrian bases. In the event of conflict, Gallant said that Israel would be prepared to strike Hezbollah with “deadly force” to ensure “Hezbollah and Lebanon pay a heavy price.”
More ominously, drones launched from the site could be used for both internal (Lebanon) and external (Israel) operational activities. The nature and direction of the runway suggests usage is planned for domestic purposes rather than against Israel. In other words, Hezbollah is preparing the airport to use it in case of an internal conflict with other Lebanese factions.
Tensions inside Lebanon are at all-time high level over Hezbollah's weapons, its dismantling of Lebanese state institutions and takeover of state institutions. Hezbollah has blocked the election of a president for almost a year now; it controls a caretaker government that has no constitutional authority to make decisions; it controls Parliamentary proceedings through its allied Speaker Nabih Berri; it controls the finance ministry which has blocked appointments to the judiciary, most notably of judges on Lebanon's supreme court which is key to override Hezbollah's obstruction of the work of the independent investigator working on the Beirut Harbor blast, largely attributed to Hezbollah's storage of three tons of a highly explosive material. Hezbollah has been recently assassinating outspoken critics, as a continuation of its career of political assassinations including prime minister Rafik Hariri and a number of Lebanese critics, politicians and journalists (mid-2000s), anti-western terrorist acts (1980s-2000) including bombing US and French troops and embassies, and kidnapping and holding hostage dozens of western clergymen, administrators, educators and journalists.
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