Unidentified hackers posted a message in Arabic and English on flight information screens in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport on Sunday condemning the Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah and warning it that the Lebanese people would not support a war against Israel.
The message, addressed to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to be a response to the terrorist leader’s speech on January 3 threatening a “no limits” war against Israel in support of the Sunni terrorist organization Hamas, which launched its own terror offensive against Israel on October 7. Hamas terrorists invaded the country that day and went on a rampage of mass killings, gang rape, torture, abduction, and infanticide that left 1,200 dead, about 250 prisoners, and displaced thousands. Hezbollah, along with its patrons in Iran and several other regional jihadist groups, celebrated the Hamas terror siege as an honorable act of “resistance” against the existence of Jewish people in the Middle East; Iran threw state-sponsored street parties to celebrate the massacre of Jews.
The hackers posted a message declaring that Lebanese people did not support a war against Israel and would not fight in it, and expressed hope that the airport, and Lebanon, be “freed” from Hezbollah’s influence. It also suggested that Hezbollah was responsible for a devastating explosion in Beirut in 2020 that left much of the city’s port in ruins and displaced thousands of people.
“In the name of God and the people, Rafik Hariri Airport is not the airport of Hezbollah and Iran,” the English-language message read, according to photos taken of the flight information screens at the airport on Sunday. “Oh Hassan Nasrallah, you will not find a supporter if Lebanon is plunged into war. You bear your responsibility and its consequences, Hezbollah.”
“We will not fight on behalf of anyone. You bombed our port and now you want to bomb our airport because of the introduction of weapons. Let the airport be freed from the grip of the state,” the message concluded.
A translation of the Arabic-language message on the screens by the Emirati newspaper The National interpreted “the state” as “the statelet,” meaning the government “statelet” under the de facto control of Hezbollah. Hezbollah has tremendous political influence in the country, which has left it with highly unstable leaders gaining control of the prime ministership and a vacant presidency since October 2022.
The reference to the port appears to blame Hezbollah for the devastating blast in Beirut in 2020, which left entire blocks of the city in rubble and reportedly displaced an estimated 80,000 children, according to UNICEF, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. The explosion caused $15 billion in damage, according to then-President Michel Aoun.
Initial investigations revealed that the explosion was caused by the detonation of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly flammable chemical, stored unsafely at the port for years. The investigations never revealed by name the owner of the ammonium nitrate, but many reports suggested that Hezbollah was storing the chemical there for use in future terrorist attacks. Nasrallah had personally threatened to level Israel using ammonium nitrate in past public remarks.
The message posted at Hariri airport on Sunday featured a logo typically used by a group known as “Soldiers of God,” a Christian anti-Hezbollah organization. The group, however, used its official social media accounts to deny that it had executed the airport hacking. The Associated Press reported that the message also featured a logo by a “little-known group that calls itself The One Who Spoke,” which did not deny involvement in the hacking. It did not offer any information on the group.
Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has spent much of the three months following October 7 attempting to balance pressure from jihadist groups and their patrons in Iran to become more heavily involved in terrorist operations against Israel with domestic disgust and concern from Lebanese people who fear a direct war against Israel and are more concerned with establishing a functional government than going to war with another. Lebanese people have taken the streets to protest their government and the destitute state of the country’s economy consistently since at least 2019. In 2023, the protests became smash-and-grab operations in which people set fire to or broke into banks and “robbed” their own money out of their accounts after the banks froze their assets.
Lebanese protesters, furious at not having access to their own savings, set fire to banks in Beirut. The country's financial crisis has slashed the value of the Lebanese pound by more than 98% since 2019 https://t.co/KFjiTHcXDD pic.twitter.com/sFvtu9gUJR
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 16, 2023
Domestic concerns appeared to triumph over Hezbollah’s need to maintain its jihadist clout in Hassan Nasrallah’s first remarks following October 7 in November, in which he emphasized that Hezbollah played no role in the Hamas attack and did not promise any concrete action to support Hamas. The speech was met with relief in Lebanon but mockery in much of the regional jihadist-supporting community.
Nasrallah greatly elevated his threats against Israel on Wednesday, marking the anniversary of the U.S. airstrike against Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
“If the enemy thinks about waging war against Lebanon, then our fighting will be with no ceiling, with no limits, with no rules. And they know what I mean,” Nasrallah was quoted as saying in his address, referring to Israel
“We are not afraid of war. We don’t fear it. We are not hesitant. If we were, we would have stopped at the front,” he claimed.
Israel reportedly eliminated a senior Hezbollah commander, Reuters reported, on Monday – a man identified as Wissam Al Tawil, a leader of Hezbollah’s “Radwan” elite terror operations force. Israeli military operations reportedly targeted the leader in a Lebanese village in retaliation for attempted Hezbollah strikes on Israel in the aftermath of October 7.
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