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Israel Home Front Defense Minister: Hezbollah Has “Over 200,000 Missiles Capable of Hitting Any House in Israel”

by TheTower.org Staff |

Among the security assurances given to Israel at the end of its 2006 war with Hezbollah was that an enlarged United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) – the peacekeeping force along the Israeli-Lebanese border – would fan across southern Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from smuggling weapons into the region. Fulfillment of those assurances seems to have fallen somewhat short:

Hezbollah has over 200,000 missiles capable of hitting any spot in the country, Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan said Tuesday. “According to an IDF worst-case scenario, Israel could find itself under attack from thousands of rockets that could last three weeks,” he said at a conference at Bar-Ilan University, according to Israel Radio. “The Hezbollah organization has over 200,000 missiles capable of hitting any house in Israel.”

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics has estimated that roughly eight million people live inside the country’s borders. Hezbollah would then have a missile for roughly 1 out of every 40 Israelis. Matthew Levitt, the director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, raised his eyebrows at the number, which exceed by almost an order of magnitude what outside observers had estimated:

Erdan’s statements came just days after a Lebanese report suggested that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime had successfully transferred to Hezbollah long-range weapons capable of carrying chemical warheads. Khaled Zaher, of the anti-Hezbollah movement Future, told a Saudi newspaper that a significant number of such missiles been transferred from Syria to Lebanon with the assistance of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. There has not been independent confirmation of the claim.

[Photo: Anton Nossik / Flickr]

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