Hezbollah rejects ex-Lebanese minister’s claims about intel apparatus

Hezbollah has dismissed a claim by Lebanon’s former interior minister Ahmad Fatfat that the Lebanese resistance movement operates a security and intelligence apparatus independent of the national General Security Directorate.

The movement said in a statement released on Monday night that Fatfat’s remarks in a recent interview with the Nida al-Watan newspaper were “slanderous fabrications and detached from reality.”

Hezbollah also termed as “absolutely false” the remarks he attributed to its Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Fatfat alleged that Nasrallah had told him that Hezbollah runs its own security and intelligence apparatus, and has close knowledge of anything that has to do with Lebanon.

Hezbollah has fostered close ties with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) for years.

Israel has continued to use offensive tactics aimed at creating chaos in Lebanon. It has planted spying devices not just on Hezbollah’s civil telecommunication networks, but also on its military ones. 

The Lebanese army soldiers and Hezbollah fighters have on many occasions foiled Israeli espionage operations, including by bringing down the regime’s spy drones and dismantling its surveillance devices planted near the country’s border regions with the occupied territories.

Hezbollah was formed following the Israeli regime’s invasion of Lebanon and the ensuing occupation of its southern parts in 1980s, and currently constitutes Lebanon’s de facto military power.

Since then, the movement has helped the national army retake the occupied regions from Tel Aviv and thwart two Israeli acts of aggression in 2000 and 2006.