Iranian plane turns back from Beirut airport after warning from Israel
Israel hacked Beirut International Airport’s control tower to warn an Iranian plane not to land, The Telegraph understands.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Friday night said that they would shoot down planes ferrying Iranian weapons to support Hezbollah.
Earlier, IDF jets had carried out an airstrike that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese terror group.
With the Iranian plane in the air, Lebanese authorities intervened and ordered it to turn back so it would avoid being fired upon by Israeli forces.
Reuters first reported the story, citing a source at Lebanon’s transport ministry saying that Israel threatened to use “force” and that the priority of the ministry is “people’s lives”.
On Saturday, the Islamic Republic’s Iran Air announced that all flights to Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport have been “suspended until further notice”.
Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport – SARY CHMAYTELLI/AFP
A flight tracker meanwhile showed an airplane affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) making a U-turn over Syria.
It’s unclear if this was the plane that was ordered not to land in Beirut, but the IRGC has sent weapons and munitions to Hezbollah in Lebanon for years, often using airplanes.
IRGC generals and advisors also regularly fly between Tehran and Beirut.
Israel has launched thousands of attacks against Iranian militants and convoys smuggling weapons to Lebanon from Iran, through Iraq and Syria. Israel has also attacked areas believed to be used for arms smuggling near Damascus airport numerous times in the past decade.
Dror Doron, the senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran who also served as a senior analyst in the Israeli prime minister’s office, told the Telegraph that the smuggling of ballistic missiles and other long-range precision-guided missiles caused Israel to launch a campaign of airstrikes in Syria in 2014 to target convoys carrying the missiles.
Mr Doron said: “Israel identified Syria as being a critical element in the route of supplying those missiles.”
On Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said that Israel could not destroy Hezbollah.
He said: “[Israeli] criminals should know that they are too small to cause significant damage to the strong construction of Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
Tehran has so far sought to avoid being drawn into a wider conflict with Israel, and Mr Khamenei’s statement appeared to continue that effort, making no mention of all-out war.
A senior Israeli official told The Telegraph that Israel planned the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, “for years.”
The official added that the last thing Nasrallah saw was Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at the UN on TV. He said: “He was sure he knew the Israelis, but he didn’t understand what was coming.
“The Iranians used Lebanon and abandoned it at the first opportunity. The whole world sees that the Iranians are a paper tiger. When the Lebanese soldiers started paying the price for Iran, Khamenei simply abandoned them. The Iranians used Lebanon and now have left it behind. Khamenei exploited Lebanon and discarded it.”
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