IDF: Hezbollah hiding $500 million in gold, cash in bunker under Beirut hospital
The Israel Defense Forces on Monday declassified intelligence on the Hezbollah terror group’s finance hub, including a bunker hidden underneath a hospital in south Beirut that it said contains hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold.
Israel expanded its campaign against Hezbollah on Sunday night, launching a series of strikes to degrade the Iran-backed terror group’s ability to fund its operations.
“The Israeli Air Force carried out a series of precise strikes on these Hezbollah financial strongholds,” IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a televised briefing.
“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,” he said, without specifying whether all of the money was destroyed in the strike.
Hagari then referenced a separate bunker also allegedly filled with cash and gold under a hospital in the capital Beirut, but said the vault had not been targeted yet by the IDF.
“According to the estimates we have, there is at least half a billion dollars in dollar bills and gold stored in this bunker,” Hagari said. “This money could and still can be used to rebuild the state of Lebanon.”
During the briefing, Hagari presented a map showing the location of the bunker, under Al-Sahel Hospital in the southern Beirut suburb known as Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah is largely based.
He called on Lebanese authorities and international organizations to prevent Hezbollah from using “the money for terror and to attack Israel,” and warned that the Israeli Air Force is monitoring the compound.
Asserting that Israel is at war with Hezbollah and not the Lebanese people, he said that the IDF would not launch a strike on the hospital.
Earlier Monday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said more than two dozen targets belonging to Al-Qard Al-Hassan — a financial firm linked to Hezbollah — had been hit.
“We struck close to 30 targets across Lebanon,” Halevi said in a statement after strikes began Sunday night against the US-sanctioned association that Israel accuses of financing “Hezbollah’s terrorist operations.”
The announcements came as the IDF said it continued to hammer an array of Hezbollah positions across Lebanon, including strikes against about 300 targets in the previous 24 hours.
Al-Qard Al-Hassan is a financial firm, officially registered as a charity, that has been offering customers credit in exchange for gold deposits on an interest-free basis since the 1980s. Israel charges that Hezbollah is making money from Lebanon civilians through AQAH.
The United States has long sanctioned the association, accusing Hezbollah of using it as a cover to mask its financial activities and gain access to the international financial system.
“In recent years, the state of Lebanon has experienced a deep financial crisis, which was exploited by Hezbollah,” the IDF spokesperson said on Monday, charging that the terror group’s two main sources of income are the Lebanese people and the Iranian regime.
He said that as well as transferring money to Hezbollah via Syria, including “suitcases of cash and gold in planes to the Iranian embassy in Beirut,” the terror group has “built factories in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Turkey that provide income for its terrorist operations.”
On Sunday evening, Israel struck AQAH branches in Beirut, the eastern Beqaa Valley and south Lebanon. Hagari presented a map of the targets in his Monday briefing.
Al-Qard Al-Hassan says it has more than 30 branches nationwide, mainly in Hezbollah bastions including Beirut’s southern suburbs, but also in central Beirut and in other major cities such as Sidon and Tyre.
Hagari also confirmed that Israel carried out an airstrike in Syria on Monday targeting the head of Hezbollah’s financial arm responsible for funneling cash from Iran to its proxy.
The IDF did not name the Hezbollah official, but said that he had only been in the position a few weeks since his predecessor was killed.
Israel in late September widened the focus of its military operations to Lebanon after over a year of cross-border attacks by Hezbollah-led forces in solidarity with Hamas — another Iranian-backed terror group — amid the war in Gaza.
Some 60,000 residents were evacuated from northern towns on the Lebanon border shortly after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, due to fears Hezbollah would carry out a similar attack, and amid increasing rocket fire by the terror group.
The attacks on northern Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 29 civilians. In addition, 43 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.
Two soldiers have been killed in a drone attack from Iraq, and there have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
The IDF estimates that around 2,000 Hezbollah operatives have been killed in the conflict. Around 100 members of other terror groups, along with hundreds of civilians, have also been reported killed in Lebanon.
Source » timesofisrael.com
