Dozens of staff members at Beirut airport with ties to Hezbollah have been fired as the new government works to crack down on the terror group at one of its main import hubs, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing senior Lebanese security and military officials.
While laws have existed for some time, the officials noted that they had finally begun being enforced, resulting in the arrests of numerous smugglers.
Ground crew members told the WSJ that, unlike in the past, no planes or passengers have been exempt from searches, and flights from Iran have been suspended since February.
“You can feel the difference,” Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in an interview with the WSJ. “We’re doing better on smuggling for the first time in the contemporary history of Lebanon.”
Lebanon has previously denied reports that Hezbollah has an arsenal stored at the airport – claiming the media had been influenced by Israel.
Anonymous airport workers claimed to the Daily Telegraph that Hezbollah was holding a weapons cache at the airport. One worker said that in November, “unusual” boxes arrived from Iran and that a high-ranking Hezbollah official was overseeing the customs shipments.
Lebanese ministers Abdallah Bou Habib, Walid Nassar, and Ziad Makary led tours to international media last year to disprove the Telegraph’s report, but refused access to reporters to a key cargo depot.
Additionally, reporters were shown a nearly empty warehouse, which is supposedly responsible for holding 20% of the import traffic, according to the Algemeiner.
Hezbollah’s smuggling network through Beirut airport
“It was a main port of entry for supporting whatever para-state activities were happening,” said Ghassan Hasbani, a former deputy prime minister and now a member of a Lebanese parliamentary bloc opposed to Hezbollah.
“It was a purposeful blind eye,” he said. “In the absence of international attention and pressure to do something about it, nothing much was done.”
Both American and Israeli military officials have been satisfied with the recent actions by the new government, although they have asserted that more work is needed to reduce Hezbollah’s hold on Lebanon’s ports of entry and the south.
“There is reason for hope here,” said a senior US official who is part of the international committee overseeing the ceasefire. “It has only been six or seven months, and we have stepped to a place that I am not sure I thought was achievable back in November.”
While Hezbollah has acknowledged that Lebanon and Israel’s efforts to disarm the group have proven successful, Ibrahim Mousawi, who represents Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliament, asserted, “Where there is a will, there is a way.”
“We are part of the system, just like any other Lebanese constituency,” said Mousawi, who also explained plans to construct a second airport, completely untouched by existing Hezbollah personnel and power infrastructure.
“They were the ones who did not want the Lebanese authorities to go for the airport,” he said. “Now things have changed.”
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