Hezbollah has arrested a Dutch armed group in a suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut amid efforts by foreign intelligence agencies to gather information leading to assassination of the resistance movement’s members, paper says.
Lebanon’s Al Akhbar daily carried the report on Saturday, saying that the arrest had taken place last Wednesday.
It described the arrestees as a six-member military detail in possession of military-grade arms, ammunition, and equipment.
The paper cited sources as saying that the group had claimed to be members of the Dutch armed forces.
They alleged to have been sent to Lebanon to purportedly simulate evacuation of Dutch nationals.
The Dutch government has claimed to be wary of exacerbation of current crossfire between Hezbollah and the Israeli regime, which started after the regime began taking the Gaza Strip under a genocidal war on October 7.
According to Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik, however, the armed group did not coordinate the alleged simulation operation with the Dutch Embassy.
“It was also discovered that they launched their operation from Kaslik,” a coastal town north of Beirut, “rather than from the Embassy or a place affiliated with the Embassy,” he added.
“Dutch ambassador to Lebanon quickly arrived at the [foreign] ministry to [mount] pressure [towards] their release, under the pretext that they had not committed any crime,” Illaik noted.
This is while the armed group had seriously violated the law by posing a “significant security threat,” he said.
The report came amid intensifying efforts by the Israeli regime’s spying apparatus and many of its counterparts around the world to dig up intelligence that could potentially contribute to assassination of members of Hezbollah and its fellow regional resistance movements.
On January 8, a senior commander of the Lebanese resistance movement was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon.
Wissam Hassan al-Tawil was killed when the strike hit the vehicle transporting him in the village of Khirbet Selm.
Earlier that month, the regime assassinated Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader of the Gaza-based resistance movement of Hamas, in a drone strike against Beirut’s Dahieh neighborhood.
Hezbollah has warned the regime that such targeted killings would not go unanswered. It has also strongly cautioned Tel Aviv against waging an all-out war against Lebanon.
