Abu Dhabi: Since Tuesday, social media has been witnessing an active circulation of an old video clip in which Hassan Nasrallah is waving missiles aimed at ammonia nitrate stores in the Haifa port. He threatens to turn the city into flames. Has it backfired?
The horrific explosion that occurred in the port of Beirut on Tuesday brought the Lebanese back to an old speech given by the leader of the Hezbollah militia four years ago in which he said he was thinking about raining the port of Haifa in the Israeli interior with a volley of rockets, threatening the Hebrew state if it thought to break the rules of engagement at the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Why target Haifa port in particular? In the video, Nasrallah announces the secret, saying that the port contains huge containers of ammonia, enough for a few rockets to hit them across the border, to turn Haifa, with its 800,000 inhabitants, into a mass of flame and terror.
Nasrallah seized the occasion of that speech to prove a “balance of terror” supposed to exist between him and Israel, in response to a series of Israeli raids on his militia sites in Syria, which are continuing to this day, and have killed dozens of field workers and leaders from his party and Iran.
Unbeatable Resistance
The video, dated back to February 16, 2016, was part of Nasrallah’s speech entitled “Unbeatable Resistance”, which he gave on the occasion of the party’s commemoration of the anniversary of its military leaders who fell in the war with Israel, and in it he talks about the deterrent power that his party possesses in the face of Tel Aviv.
Nasrallah said, “Some rockets are enough from us in addition to the ammonia containers in Haifa port, and their result will be that of a nuclear bomb in an area inhabited by 800,000 people, killing tens of thousands of them.”
After this threat, Israeli authorities took urgent steps to vacate the Haifa port warehouses from ammonia, but Beirut, in which Hezbollah controls its political decision, retained 2,700 tonnes of the same chemicals stored at the port for six years whose explosion was sufficient to wreak havoc in the city. It was an incredibly similar scenario that Nasrallah drew in his speech, but with the flesh and blood of innocent Lebanese, and not that of the enemy’s.
