Israel’s air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel yesterday described “thousands” of military installations created by Hezbollah in residential buildings across Lebanon.

“We will have to deal aggressively with thousands of Hezbollah bases which threaten the State of Israel and mainly our interior,” Eshel said in a speech, citing Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon among the locations of the bases.

Eshel gestured toward what has traditionally been described as Hezbollah’s double war crime – using Lebanese civilians as cover for rocket and missile attacks on Israeli civilians – and blasted the group for systematically creating a network of behind human shields. Hezbollah is thought to possess more 100,000 projectiles, including what Israeli Military Intelligence Chief Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi yesterday described as “hundreds of different kinds of advanced antitank missiles, advanced mortar shells.”

“They are much more precise and a lot more lethal. The most significant thing we would like to point out is the fact that the enemy has the capability to land mass amounts of arms on Israeli cities,” he said.

Hezbollah leaders have threatened to saturation bomb Israeli cities should another conflict with Jerusalem break out, and a senior Iranian military commander recently bragged to Iranian media that the group’s arsenal can “pinpoint” targets anywhere in Israel. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah late last year explicitly called for the destruction of the Jewish state, stating that it was “a cancerous presence” and that “the only solution when it comes to cancer is to eradicate it.”

[Photo: PBS NewsHour / YouTube]