Hezbollah commander unveils new weapon on Al Mayadeen

Posted on February 27, 2024 by uprootedpalestinians

February 27, 2024

Hezbollah anti-armor unit commander Hajj Jihad during an exclusive interview for Al Mayadeen

The commander of Hezbollah’s anti-armored munitions unit reveals a new NLOS weapon developed by the Resistance in the face of the Israeli occupation.

Since the start of the confrontations on the Lebanese-Palestinian border area on October 8, there have been talks within “Israel” about the “anti-armor weapons” possessed by Hezbollah, with there being grave concerns about the Resistance’s capabilities.

Israeli media, the political and military spheres, and much more, have expressed great fear of the development of the capabilities of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, which has become “a champion in missile sniping.”

Anti-armor missiles are one of the many specialties of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, and the status quo of the battlefield in the current limited confrontation has made this weapon take the lead at this stage.

Al Mayadeen Exclusive | "During 2006 [war on Lebanon], the Israeli enemy soldiers abandoned a Gill Spike missile system and fled, while the [Lebanese] fighters seized this equipment and it was subsequently transferred to the Islamic Republic of #Iran."

– A commander in… https://t.co/GyzflueoDW
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) February 26, 2024

A commander in Hezbollah’s anti-armor unit told Al Mayadeen in an exclusive interview that the Islamic resistance in Lebanon is a large group with numerous divisions, and each division has its own battle system.

In this operation, Hezbollah’s anti-armor capabilities had the lion’s share in the fighting due to the nature of the mission, but the rest of the divisions, each of which had their own sets of skills, did not all-out participate in the battle and only did so in a limited manner. Had they fully participated, the commander said, the Israeli occupation “would have seen things it would have never expected.”

The official continued by saying that the advantages that made anti-armor the star of this battle are the advantages it enjoys, namely “flexibility, effectiveness and simplicity.” Flexibility “qualifies it to work in this battle against threats and shelling,” while simplicity relates to “the simplicity of training and use.”

As for effectiveness, the anti-armor units confront the occupation’s forces who use tanks and armored personnel carriers, as it “has the effectiveness to work against all enemy targets.”

Al Mayadeen‘s political and Lebanese affairs analyst, Abbas Fneish, confirmed when talking about the operations carried out by the resistance since October 8 that the escalation was gradual.

During the first two weeks, “all the targets were clear on the surface, as the resistance targeted tanks, personnel, and positions.” Most of these targets were hit with anti-armor weapons, he clarified.

Later, the resistance began to pursue the occupation, as it went deeper and closer to the border area and hid in the groves and newly created points, Fneish added. The developments and results themselves speak for the effectiveness of the anti-armor unit, with dozens of destroyed Israeli tanks and military sites and other reinforcements where Israeli soldiers are sheltering themselves.

Paramount Israeli destruction

A tally done by Al Mayadeen revealed all the Israeli losses suffered due to the Resistance’s operations using anti-armor munitions, which included 460 strikes with guided munition and 105 strikes with unguided munition.

The strikes in question include 87 that were carried out from weapons yet to be unveiled by the Resistance, 82 of whom are guided and the remaining 5 are unguided.

Fneish underlined that the Resistance was adhering to secrecy because it did not want to put all its cards on the table as its confrontation with the Israeli occupation kept unfolding.

This is a breakdown of all the different weapons used by the Resistance against the Israeli occupation forces.

Guided munition

Kornet: 128

Fagot: 95

TOW: 56

Tharallah: 28

Special system (Almas): 23

Malyutka: 23

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Kornet (8-10km): 14

Metis: 8

MILAN: 3

Other: 82

Unguided munition

SPG-9 recoilless rifle: 36

106 recoilless rifle: 24

B-10 recoilless rifle: 22

82mm mortar: 9

RPG-29 : 4

RPG-7: 3

57 recoilless rifle: 2

Other: 5

‘Israel’ defeated

The Hezbollah commander, after the group’s capabilities were displayed in full by the sheer number of operations it carried out against the Israeli occupation, underlined that the Resistance defeated the Israeli occupation, but stressed that this was not anything new.

“We did not defeat the enemy today, we defeated them when we destroyed the Merkava tank in 1993,” he said. “We defeated the enemy when we turned the entire border area into a ghost town. We defeated the enemy when one of its experts said we had sleepless eyes; when we destroyed its reinforcements to pave the way for the entry of our freedom fighters.”

“We defeated the enemy when we surprised them using the Kornet in 2006 and we rendered the Hujeir Valley into a graveyard of tanks,” he said.

Today the Israeli occupation stands bewildered in the face of the Resistance’s anti-armor capabilities, the Hezbollah top commander stressed.

“One of the tricks up our sleeves during this battle is that anti-armor munitions are no longer the only weapon in our possession as was the case in 2006,” he added. “The battle today is with reinforcements and infantry troops, which called for us to put into commission a new kind of munition.”

“There are missiles capable of destroying houses and killing everyone inside of them. Thermobaric missiles are capable of destroying whole houses and killing everyone inside,” the Hezbollah commander said.

Abbas Fneish, meanwhile, went on to highlight that the Resistance put into commission three types of missiles, the first one is thermobaric missiles with a range of 8 km and 10 km, the second is the Tharallah system, and the third is a special precision-guided system.

Most sophisticated missile

The third system in question was made after Resistance fighters managed to capture a Spike MR abandoned by Israeli soldiers who had escaped during the 2006 July War. The missile system was taken and sent to the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was revealed to Al Mayadeen.

The Spike is one of the most sophisticated anti-armor weapons in the world; it is equipped with a camera that allows whoever is controlling it to manually seek the target, and the latter does not have to be within its plane of sight to get struck.

“We have a weapon that does not need a target that is within its plane of sight. The first time this weapon was used was to destroy a Merkava in ‘Metula’. Several targets have been engaged with this weapon,” the Hezbollah top commander said.

“The enemy is hiding this information and preventing it from publication so that its soldiers are not frightened and so they do not end up deserting,” he stressed.

That weapon, he said, is the Almas. “The Resistance saw that this was the right moment to unveil this weapon.”

“Numerous systems were left on the battlefield, and the Israelis carried out air raids thinking that it would manage to destroy them, but they failed and this remained a secret,” Fneish told Al Mayadeen.

When the Hezbollah fighters got ahold of the weapon, they communicated with Hajj Imad Mughniyeh who, in turn, communicated with Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and they wound up sending it to Iran. “The Resistance sought to reverse engineer the weapon, and this it produced the Almas.”