Hezbollah plans to have a half a million missiles, based on Syrian soil, pointed at Israel by the end of the year.
By: The Tower and United with Israel Staff
A pro-Hezbollah website boasted that in a year, the Iran-backed terror group could have 500,000 missiles, which, according to an expert, would give Hezbollah the ability to “saturate Israel with rockets,” making the next war “nasty,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
An article at the Dahiya website, a Lebanese pro-Hezbollah site, claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently rejected an Israeli demand, relayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, to remove the 70,000 Iranian long-range missiles Hezbollah has deployed throughout Syria that are aimed at the Jewish state.
Assad, according to the article, has ordered his army to build and camouflage missile silos to allow Hezbollah to build its rocket arsenal in Syria, aiming to reach 500,000. This would be added to another 150,000 missiles the terror group already has in Lebanon.
The article further claimed that Syria and Hezbollah will wage a “joint missile campaign” against Israel, and that Iranian experts are ready to launch missiles at Israel from every part of Lebanon and Syria.
“[These missiles] are meant to be fired into occupied Palestine from Syrian territory. They significantly complicate [the activity of] the Israeli enemy’s air force, [since it] will have to bombard Hezbollah’s missiles and bases in Lebanon in addition to the bases spread across Syria, which hold [these] 70,000 long-range Iranian missiles aimed at the Israeli enemy,” the article said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
“The ability for Iran to move weaponry into Syria is only limited by Iran’s transportation fleet and what they have available in their arsenal,” Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on terror financing and senior vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon. Essentially, he is saying that there is nothing stopping Iran’s military expansion in to Syria, save Israeli strikes against the weapons shipments.
This makes matters difficult for Israel, as “Iran is exploiting the fog of war, and it’s working,” he added.
“The strategy may now be emerging: saturate Israel with rockets from two northern fronts and overwhelm their air defenses,” Schanzer assessed. “Israel has some big decisions ahead. The longer they wait to neutralize this threat, the more nasty that two-front rocket arsenal becomes.”