AARAMTA: Lebanon’s Hezbollah organised a large-scale military exercise in Aaramta, around 20 kilometres north of the Israeli border and simulated cross-border raids into the country, AFP correspondents said.

It coincided with Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Sunday, a controversial move by the extreme-right politician amid heightened tensions in occupied east Jerusalem.

Around 200 Hezbollah fighters took part in the raids using live ammunition and an attack drone in a show of its military might. Dozens of journalists were invited to the event.

One simulated raid involved a drone attack against a target inside Israel, while in another, fighters attacked vehicles across a mock border, retrieved a dummy’s body from one of the cars and whisked it back across the “frontier”.

Ben-Gvir’s visit to Al-Aqsa flares up tensions; Jordan, Palestine condemn ‘provocative step’

Hezbollah also put on display heavy and light arms, including anti-aircraft weapons and rocket launchers as well as rocket-propelled grenades.

“If some people in the Zionist entity (Israel) dream of doing something foolish... we will rain down our precision missiles and all the weapons at our disposal,” senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said at the event.

Snipers shot at targets adorned with the Star of David while other fighters jumped through flaming hoops, during the largest demonstration of the group’s military muscle in years in southern Lebanon.

Ben-Gvir visits Al-Aqsa

The visit by Israel’s national security minister was being seen as a controversial move amid heightened tensions in annexed east Jerusalem.

It came three days after the minister and tens of thousands of Jewish nationalists had marched through the Old City to celebrate what they called victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

“Jerusalem is our soul,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram, alongside a photo of himself at the site in the heart of the Old City. “The threats of Hamas will not deter us, I went up to the Temple Mount!” he wrote, using the Jewish name for the site.

Denouncing Ben-Gvir’s visit, the Hamas group wrote on Telegram that Israel will “bear responsibility for the barbaric incursions of its ministers and herds of settlers”.

Later on Sunday, Israel’s top politicians held a rare cabinet meeting in the tunnels beneath the Western Wall. Palestinians fear that the use of these tunnels as ‘a vast museum’ threatens the foundations of Al-Aqsa mosque.

‘Dangerous and unacceptable’

Jordan decried Ben-Gvir’s actions as a “provocative step” and a “dangerous and unacceptable escalation”. It “represents a flagrant and unacceptable violation of international law, and of the historical and legal status quo in Jerusalem and its holy sites”, the foreign ministry spokesman said.

The office of Palestinian prime minister Mahmud Abbas said “harming Al-Aqsa Mosque is playing with fire”.

“(It) will push the region into a religious war with unimaginable consequences that will affect everyone,” an Abbas’s spokesman said.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2023