Surprise! Hezbollah is violating UN embargo

A recent explosion in Southern Lebanon provides another glaring example that Hezbollah operates with impunity despite U.N. Security Council Resolutions expressly calling for their disarmament, and that the 15,000-strong UNIFIL force won’t do anything to stop them.

The exploding warehouse actually turned out to be a Hezbollah weapons cache that according to military analyst W. Thomas Smith Jr. “is said to have stored all manner of ‘rockets, mortars, artillery shells, grenades,’ and other munitions smuggled by Iran and Syria to the terrorist group in Lebanon since the Hizballah-Israel war.”

Smith adds:

… upon setting up a security perimeter around the blast site, the Lebanese army blocked soldiers with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) from entering the security zone to investigate. Hizballah on the other hand, was given a green light.

In the same article, Smith reports that Hezbollah has trained between 100 and 150 Lebanese army soldiers on the use of the terrorist group’s offensive missiles obtained from Iran.

How can this be?

Smith’s sources tell him that “Hizballah has penetrated many elements of the Lebanese army from intelligence to combat arms units; and this is due primarily to the active, though illegal, joint Hizballah-Lebanese Army ‘Operations Room’ established by the Lebanese government and Syria in the 1990s.”

Elements within the Lebanese army (an army which receives direct military support from the U.S.) are complicit. And UNIFIL – 14 of whose soldiers were injured by stone-throwing civilians when they attempted to move against another suspected cache – appears unable to do anything about it.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gabriela Shalev said in a letter to the Security Council that Hezbollah’s actions represented “a clear violation of [UNSCR] 1701,” and added that “Such violations jeopardize the fragile stability along Israel’s northern border and stand in contravention of UN Security Council resolution 1701, in particular paragraph 8 that calls for ‘full respect for the Blue Line by both parties’.”

Who has any respect the ‘Blue Line’ at this point? UNIFIL considers this incident a “serious violation,” but really – what are they going to do about it?