At least six weapons experts from the Lebanese Army were killed, and an unspecified number of others were wounded Saturday on the outskirts of the town of Zebqine, when the weapons cache they were in the process of inspecting and dismantling exploded.
It was one of the old depots south of the Litani River that was run by Hezbollah, but which they had abandoned as the ceasefire required them to relocate north of the river. The Lebanese Army has been moving to shuttered such facilities, though as this incident shows, it’s not always safe to quickly rummage through the old sites.
The experts were supposed to be removing the weapons from the site, and while officials say they’re still not sure what exactly caused the blast, it’s not hard to imagine that weapons old enough that Hezbollah just left them there weren’t easy to safely relocate.
Funerals for the slain soldiers were held on Sunday, and government officials were in attendance to praise them for their valor. The soldiers were posthumously awarded with medals and their bodies will be returned to their hometowns.
The government has been under intense pressure to speed up the dismantling of Hezbollah sites in the south, with Israel launching near daily attacks against southern Lebanon, claiming the targets are either secretly Hezbollah leaders or in some other way Hezbollah infrastructure. The Army has taken over and/or dismantled a lot of sites in the area already, but after several decades of Hezbollah gearing up to resist intermittent Israeli invasions, there’s a lot more to go.
Today, Israel carried out a strike against Aynata, in southern Lebanon, killing one person. They claimed the person was a secret Hezbollah intelligence-collecting operative, though they provided no evidence of that. They also added that the presence of the alleged operative amounted to a violation of the ceasefire.
