The Israel Defense Force (IDF) provided what it said were precise directions to Hezbollah’s vault of $500 million in cash and gold underneath Al-Sahel Hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday after journalists said they could not find it.
On Monday, as Breitbart News reported, the IDF published a video claiming that the vault, stacked with money from Iran, vault was part of a complex underneath the hospital. The IDF emphasized that there was no plan to attack the hospital but urged Lebanon not to allow Iranian-backed Hezbollah to use the cash and gold to fund its terror attacks.
The hospital was evacuated, and the director of the hospital claimed that there was no vault underneath it. Several journalists participated in a tour of the hospital and declared that they could not find any such vault on the premises.
The anti-Israel, pro-Russia correspondent Steve Sweeney, for example, posted the following on X (formerly Twitter):
In response, IDF Arabic spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani posted precise directions to the vault, indicating that the entrance to the vault was not in the hospital itself, but in a neighboring building, accessible via the basement:
Israel has been physically targeting Hezbollah’s various financial and economic assets in the past two days of fighting.
The IDF does not target hospitals as a matter of policy and adherence to international law, though it has battled Hamas terrorists in Gaza who have used hospitals to launch attacks, store weapons, and hide hostages. Hospitals lose their protected status under international humanitarian law when they are used for military, non-medical purposes.
The IDF also pushed back Tuesday against claimed that it had carried out an airstrike near the Rafic Hariri Hospital in Beirut, saying that it had hit a Hezbollah terror target, and not the hospital, according to the Times of Israel.
False claims about the IDF targeting hospitals have been a staple of anti-Israel media coverage since the alleged targeting of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza last October. In fact, the hospital’s parking lot had been hit by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Iranian-backed terror group. The media nonetheless ran with sensational and instant claims by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claiming that 500 people had been killed.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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