After the street fighting that made seven dead, Thursday, the Secretary General of the Shiite Party “advises the Lebanese forces to completely give up the idea of the civil war”.
Le Monde with AP, AFP and Reuters
Four days after the most deadly clashes that Beirut has for more than ten years, the leader of the Pro-Iranian Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, addressed a warning to the Christian Party of Lebanese forces.
In a televised speech, Monday, October 18, the Secretary General of the Shiite party attributed to the Christian party to have opened fire, Thursday, at the heart of the Lebanese capital, on his followers and those of his ally, the movement Shiite Amal, making seven dead. Clashes that have fueled fears of a new cycle of violence in the country. “This mine we managed to defuse Thursday can explode again at any time and in any region”, warned Mr. Nasrallah in his speech.
“I reveal for the first time this figure: we have 100,000 fighters, trained and armed,” Nasrallah said. A difficult figure to check. “I advise the Lebanese forces and to their leader to completely give up the idea of the civil war and that of internal conflict,” he said. “Your calculation is bad (…), the region has never known as powerful Hezbollah as now.”
On October 14, Hezbollah and Amal had organized a demonstration before the Beirut Courthouse to demand the replacement of Judge Tarek Bitar, in charge of the Gigantic Explosion inquiry at the port of the capital on 4 August 2020 ( more than 200 deaths).
However, Mr. Nasrallah did not ask for the replacement of Bitar J., as he had done in his previous speech on 11 October. He simply repeated that the explosion survey at the port was “selective” and that it “CILL] politically [the] allies and [the] friends” of Hezbollah. The Shiite party had already accused the judge to politicize the investigation and aim for specific camp figures.
Weapons of Hezbollah
Amal and Hezbollah accuse the Lebanese forces of having deployed francs on the rooftops of the surrounding Christian neighborhood buildings and opening the fire.
Friday, the leader of the Lebanese forces, Samir Geagea, had denied these accusations and affirmed that the inhabitants of the Christian district of Ain El-Remmaneh had “defended” against “Hezbollah Militia who had tried. ‘Enter their homes “.
Hezbollah is the only training in Lebanon to have been able to legally maintain its weapons after the end of the civil war (1975-1990), in the name of “Resistance” against Israel. The Lebanese forces, for their part, filed the arms at the end of the civil war and have become part of – their leader is the only lords of the war to have been imprisoned for eleven years of the time of the Syrian domination on Lebanon.
Friday, Moscow has enjoined the actors of the crisis to “show restraint” and Riyadh called the Lebanese leaders to “real and serious changes”. Thursday, France had invited “the appeasement” and the United States to “de-escalation”. The spokesperson for the United Nations, Stéphane Dujarric, advocated for an “impartial survey” on the explosion.