BEIRUT: Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television may have gone underground, broadcasting from a secret location since Israeli air strikes pulverised its headquarters, but its journalists are still out in the field and refuse to be silenced.

The Shia militant group says its emergency plans had already swung into action after the station was banned on a satellite carrier in Europe in 2004, with Washington and Brussels branding Hezbollah a terrorist organisation.

“We considered that ban a warning. If in times of peace they wanted to silence us, what would they do in a time of war?” said Ibrahim Farhat of Al-Manar, which means “the beacon” in English.

Farhat, 42, has been serving as public relations chief for the defiant satellite TV channel, a change from his peacetime duties as head of a think-tank.

The station’s five-storey headquarters in the Shia southern suburbs of Beirut, with a studio in the basement and offices above, were first attacked in an Israeli air strike on July 13.

That was one day after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others, triggering a conflict in which hundreds of people have since lost their lives on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border, with civilians in Lebanon bearing the brunt.

“We had already reduced our numbers (when the planes struck Al-Manar) and only one person was slightly hurt,” said Farhat. “We started preparing for a situation when Al-Manar would be considered a military target.”

Three days later, the building was reduced to rubble. But as in the rest of the normally teeming suburbs, “we had mostly evacuated and suffered only a few light injuries”, he said.

Farhat is proud of the operation which has kept Al-Manar on the air from a location which is being kept a military secret.

“We were off the air for just two minutes — that’s all it took for the switch of location,” he said. “We moved to premises which we had prepared in advance, well before the 12th.”

Al-Manar, a private station with shareholders, also had substitute relay stations on standby. “Now at the national level we have almost total coverage, while the satellite coverage internationally is total,” Farhat said.

His colleague Zeinab al-Saffar, a white-headscarfed news anchor, normally doubles as an academic, teaching subjects at the Lebanese University ranging from media studies and fine arts to business and hotel management.—AFP