Hezbollah and AP

I had a couple of column topics ready to go – some interesting missile stuff – and then I ran across this AP article in several news feeds.

The Associated Press released an article – an extremely sympathetic article, including a lead  picture of a scarred up little boy – about the horrors and recovery of the Israeli-Hezbollah pager attacks. Not Hezbollah the terrorist group, but the sympathetic ‘freedom fighters’*, the soldiers, and of course their innocent dependents.

At that moment on Sept. 17, 2024, thousands of pagers distributed to the Hezbollah group were blowing up in homes, offices, shops and on frontlines across Lebanon, remotely detonated by Israel. Hezbollah had been firing rockets into Israel almost daily for nearly a year in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

And, you’ve just read the ONLY unsympathetic-to-Hezbollah line of the article. The rest is  scarred children and sob stories. The word “terrorist”? None. “Militant?” Once. Then there

is “a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions.” Yeah, like launching artillery and missiles at Israel.

Human rights and United Nations reports, however, say the attack may have violated international law, calling it indiscriminate.

Even Hezbollah admits that the majority of those killed and injured were Hezbollah fighters or personnel.

Hezbollah won’t say how many civilians were hurt, but says most were relatives of the group’s personnel or workers in Hezbollah-linked institutions, including hospitals.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency declined to comment on AP questions about those allegations. But Israeli security officials have rejected that the attack was indiscriminate, saying the pagers were exclusively sold to Hezbollah members and that tests were conducted to ensure that only the person holding the pager would be harmed.  AP

The tone of the AP article is overwhelmingly sympathetic – to Hezbollah. I could almost see if they had written such an article if AP was headquartered in London, or perhaps in a majority Moslem city. But their headquarters are in New York (ironically the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world, exceeded only by Tel Aviv. Jerusalem has about half as many Jewish residents as New York. Wiki )

You almost picture the AP as supporting Hezbollah: well, they did share a building with Hamas once:

In 2021, reports emerged that the AP had shared a Gaza office building with Hamas military intelligence, though it has denied knowing this.  Fox News

Elsewhere, Al Jazeera reports that Lebanon has decided that only Lebanese should be armed in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s reaction: “Uh, no.”

The group on Wednesday rejected a decision by the Lebanese cabinet a day earlier that authorises the Lebanese army to draw up a plan to confine arms across the country to six official security forces by the end of the year.

Prime Minister Nawaf Salam confirmed the decree after the cabinet meeting, saying it is “the state’s duty to monopolise the possession of weapons”, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA).

Salam’s declaration on Tuesday amounted to an official rejection by the Lebanese government of Hezbollah’s military presence in the country, an unthinkable development two years ago when the group held sway in the country and its military powers were a forceful reality in the region.

In a written statement on Wednesday, Hezbollah said the move was a result of US “diktats” and that it would “deal with it as if it does not exist”.  Al-Jazeera

Might maybe get interesting for Hezbollah – Iran sure does not want to lose its single largest proxy warfare group, but Hezbollah yielding to Lebanese pressure would do just that. But does Hezbollah want to be caught in the middle of a Lebanon – Israel situation in which they are the mutual target?

 

* I’ve always maintained that when the world’s press refers to these sort of people as “militia” they present an image of the groups as ‘Red Dawn’ style fighters for liberty. Any of these groups driving around with self-propelled arty or rocket launchers capable of launching explosives hundreds of miles is an ARMY.