In what is purported to be a flexing of muscles for Israeli consumption, the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah held a military parade in Syria on Sunday, to show off its armored vehicles and anti-tank missiles, Israel Defense/nrg reported on Monday.
By: Ruthie Blum/The Algemeiner
According to the report, based on photos in the twitter feeds of @NatDefFor and @Souria4Syrians — the exhibit took place in al-Qusayr — a city in the Homs region — which is considered the Lebanon-based Hezbollah’s key base in Syria.
This is not the first time that Hezbollah has issued veiled — and not-so-veiled — threats against the Jewish state since its last war with Israel in Lebanon in 2006. And today, with its enhanced role as an Iranian proxy on the ground in Syria, fighting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad — and with Russian backing — the terrorist group has become further emboldened.
This is why the IDF has been undertaking a large-scale engineering operation to secure the Lebanese border against infiltration by Hezbollah terrorists into Israel. As part of this operation, members of the IDF Northern Command Combat Engineering Corps are digging trenches and erecting a fence around the seven-mile-long area of Har Dov (also known as the Shebaa Farms) — a strip of land at the intersection of the Lebanese-Syrian border and the Israeli Golan Heights.
In January, Hezbollah detonated a bomb near an IDF patrol on the Lebanese border — claiming it was a response to the assassination of notorious Hezbollah operative Samir Kuntar in Syria the previous month. This sparked Israeli retaliation in the form of an artillery strike against an outpost of the terrorist group in that area.
According to a Washington, DC-based Lebanese journalist interviewed by The Algemeiner over the summer — the tenth anniversary of the Second Lebanon War — Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s harsh rhetoric and other muscle-flexing against Israel are aimed at bolstering his organization’s standing among “disillusioned” Shiites in Lebanon, rather than signal an impending war with the Jewish state.