Israel’s War on Hezbollah’s Goldfinger

The exposure of a Beirut hospital basement that could be owned by a James Bond villain, Goldfinger, is just the tip of an iceberg: While America attempts to choke off terror-financing institutions with sanctions, the Israel Defense Force bombs them. The IDF spokesman, Rear Admiral Hagari, on Monday presented a model of Beirut’s al-Sahel hospital, including a portion of the basement where he said Hezbollah has stashed $500 million in cash and gold. Credulous reporters were ushered to the hospital by Hezbollah operatives the next day. “Doctors denied the allegation and took the BBC through the building, including to the first and second level below ground,” the British broadcaster’s Orla Guerin reported dutifully. “We found large steel doors, but Hezbollah members didn’t allow us to enter and inspect it,” a report for the Lebanon-based LBCI television countered.Either way, Israel’s recent successes in Lebanon lend some credibility to the IDF’s intelligence chops. Beyond decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership and eliminating its rocket arsenals, Israel is now zooming in on its financing. While sparing the hospital stash, “the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of precise strikes on these Hezbollah financial strongholds,” Admiral Hagari said Monday, pointing to a dozen sites. “One of our main targets last night was an underground vault with tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold. The money was being used to finance Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.”The IDF is homing in on a shadow banking system known as al-Qard al-Hassan. Disguised as a charity group, it has amassed a fortune from drug dealing and other illicit activities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as receiving cash and gold transfers from Hezbollah’s benefactor, Iran.For years, the group has usurped the once-thriving but now crumbling Lebanese banking system. Al-Qard al-Hassan is now Lebanon’s lender, credit card issuer, and financier. America has designated the faux charity for sanctions as part of the 2001 Patriot Act, which aims to “provide financial institutions with information regarding suspected terrorist or money laundering activity.” In America “we follow the money. Israel is vaporizing the money,” a terror-financing watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Emanuele Ottolenghi, tells the Sun.The Israelis, Mr. Ottelenghi says, tell American counterparts, “You know that guy you sanctioned in 2018 who was moving gold from Venezuela to Iran, and then helped launder it in Turkey and finance Hezbollah in the process? He has been sitting sweet in Beirut with no consequences from the sanctions, because he doesn’t use the U.S. financial system. We’re going to vaporize him, and that’s how we solve the problem.”In April a top al-Qard al-Hassan financier, Mohammad Srour, was abducted and killed at a Lebanese resort town villa. He had been designated by the U.S. Treasury in 2019. The house where the body was found had been cleaned of any traces of those who had rented it before disappearing to thin air.An Israeli intelligence operation is widely believed to have ended Srour’s life. His interrogation in that remote villa could have yielded information on the location of the financial group’s assets, names of operatives, and other clues to help the IDF’s current operations. As the Beirut airport is mostly non-operational at this point, transfers of cash from Iran to Hezbollah now land at the Syrian air base at Latakia, and from there are moved over land to Lebanon. That route is vulnerable to Israeli attacks, which forces the hard-hit terror group to increasingly rely on other sources of income. “Hezbollah is seeking to quickly boost sales of illegal drugs in Europe, as the Iran-backed Lebanese militia reels from a weeks-long Israeli offensive that has destroyed and disrupted its key sources of cash in Lebanon,” the Voice of America reported Wednesday, citing two former Washington officials, David Asher and Thomas Cindric.Like a mob operation, Hezbollah has long used criminal enterprises to finance its war machine and boost its control over Lebanon’s state institutions. In fighting Hezbollah, Washington relies on sanctions and the group’s exclusion from the dollar-based banking system, which might be ineffective in this case. “As a top financial power, America is able to interfere in each dollar-based banking interaction,” an Israeli reporter, Pazit Ravina, tells the Sun. “The Israeli approach is based on the fact that very little of al-Qard al-Hassan activity is conducted in cash, and that it’s detached from the global banking system. That’s why Israel opts for physical destruction of cash and gold.”Ms. Ravina’s Makor Rishon article last week on targeting Hezbollah finances preceded Admiral Hagari’s disclosure of the stash at the al-Sahel hospital’s basement. The IDF disclosure forced Hezbollah to deny the existence of $500 million in gold and cash.The denial aside, the terrorists might find it hard to access their treasure and move it out of the basement. “A half billion dollars in gold weighs about eight, nine tons. It’s not something you put in a suitcase,” Mr. Ottolenghi notes.

Israel’s War on Hezbollah’s Goldfinger

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