Hezbollah’s reckless actions will “drag Lebanon’s puppet government [to ?war] and Lebanon will end up paying a heavy price,” Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee head Avi Dichter says • “It will find itself back in the 19th century,” he says.
Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman MK Avi Dichter (Likud)
Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Avi Dichter (Likud) warned Wednesday that any offensive action by Hezbollah will see the IDF “crush” the Shiite terrorist group.
In a Facebook post following the discovery of Hezbollah terror tunnels snaking under the Israel-Lebanon border, Dichter wrote that “if Hezbollah digs tunnels as a means of transporting hundreds of thousands of terrorists into Israel, aiming to seize control over Israeli territory and wave the Hezbollah flag there, they will soon find that they will be crushed in Lebanon by Israel’s power.”
“They will also drag Lebanon’s puppet government [to war] and Lebanon will end up paying a heavy price. It will find itself back in the 19th century,” Dichter wrote.
Hezbollah, he continued, “is trying to imitate Hamas in Gaza, but Hamas understands that digging tunnels means digging graves for its operatives. As of yesterday [Tuesday], Hezbollah understands this, too.”
“The tunnels breaching Israeli territory are a clear operational manifestation of Hezbollah’s policy shift. They demonstrate that Hezbollah is preparing an offensive action, not just building its defenses. This is perhaps the most significant lesson Nasrallah learned following the [2006] Second Lebanon War,” Dichter wrote.
In another post, days after the Israeli military launched Operation Northern Shield to destroy the Hezbollah tunnels, Dichter dismissed the Zionist Union’s demand to convene an urgent meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to explore the timing of the operation.
The opposition claims the operation was launched to distract the public from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest legal troubles and the fact that the police recently recommended he be indicted on corruption charges.
“The members of the opposition chose to link the operation in the north to political interests. To them, that is what the IDF does. After failing to shorten the term of the current coalition, the opposition leaders chose to tie the Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon to the prime minister’s and the coalition’s personal political interests. They are not letting the fact that the IDF chief of staff supported and pushed for this operation change their mind. There is no operational aspect to the timing, in their eyes – it’s all political,” he wrote.
The opposition seems to think Israelis have no brains and can only focus on one news story at a time. Besides, they are wrong to think we’re all obsessing over Bibi being the victim of a witch hunt. We don’t think that his using defense plays against our enemies is a distraction from the trumped up witch hunt charges being filed against him. It’s beyond ludicrous that with all the media in Israel, Bibi would resort to bribes to get one media source to write nice stories about him. I think Israelis are astute enough to get their news from a variety of sources and stories will balance out the picture citizens receive of their PM. Everyone knows there is no competition for Bibi’s job and he’s the only one who can lead us right now, so why in the heck would he need to bribe anyone for good press? It makes absolutely no sense, and these accusations have been played up in the press while the legal system hasn’t done anything. That seems really to indicate the police are corrupt and they’re trying to swing the corruption charges toward Bibi when it really is them. This is embarrassing the citizens of Israel and if there was really any crimes of substance to charge Bibi with, the investigation should have been done without leaking all the baseless charges to the media. The media carrying this stuff has revealed its corruption. Hopefully the Knesset will act to do something against this witch hunt.