Lebanon’s Minister of Environment Tarek al-Khatib is sponsoring a campaign of “Green on all Borders,” with the aim of planting one million trees along his country’s southern border with Israel, on behalf of Hezbollah Al-Ahed News Website reported Sunday.
The Environment Ministry’s spokesman, Hatem Harb, told the press conference at the city of Nabatiyeh in south Lebanon that the new campaign will “meet the appeal of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, to launch the planting activities in the south and western Beqaa Valley, to launch a green campaign on the border, a campaign to protect Lebanon and the resistance, as ordered and wanted by His Eminence, and to plant a million trees in the next five years.”
Back in June, Israel complained to the United Nations Security Council that Hezbollah was establishing observation posts along the Israeli-Lebanese border, presenting them as part of the works of an environmental NGO. IDF intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Hertzl Halevi said at the time that “Hezbollah is using an environmental organization as a cover for activities along the border with Israel.”
Minister al-Khatib said, “It is my honor to be a guest on the land of resistance and redemption in a green campaign that borders all […] for a dignified life in a clean natural environment and in an environment of resistance that was presented in order to defend the martyrs’ homeland and to plow their land with their pure blood.”
“Planting a tree in the south means that you are contributing to the purification of the air from contaminants so that the people of Keserwan (northeast of Lebanon’s capital Beirut) and Akkar (northwest Lebanon), as well as the sons of the South, will clean it, and this is a message of sincere love from the sons of the south to their brothers in the homeland.”
The planned thick forests in southern Lebanon would go a long way to obscure Hezbollah’s arsenal of an estimated 150,000 missiles, including advanced Iranian surface-to-sea and anti-aircraft weapons systems. The environmentally appropriate new trees would also cover the entrances to Hezbollah’s network of underground terror tunnels north of the border with Israel, as well as its complex of underground rocket manufacturing facilities.