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Iran Is Using Lebanon’s Airport to Fund Terrorism; The World Must Respond
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian speaks during a press conference upon arrival at Beirut international airport, Lebanon February 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
The Lebanese government has a choice to make — reclaim effective control of its main international airport from Hezbollah, or see that air hub destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces. As government ministers in Beirut ponder their decision, Washington can help.
For the past year, Beirut’s Rafic Hariri international airport has been the main gateway for Iran’s resupply of weapons to Hezbollah, its terror proxy in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s full control of the airport has allowed Iran to easily resupply its allies there.
But not anymore.
Hours after Israel’s successful elimination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on September 28, an Iranian cargo plane left Tehran’s international airport for Beirut. But upon entering Lebanon’s airspace, the control tower — under threat of Israeli kinetic action — denied landing permission to the aircraft, which turned around and headed back to Iran.
Data obtained from an open source — commercial flight tracker FlightRadar24 — show that subsequent Iranian flights, on October 1, October 5 and October 7, also failed to reach Beirut, also reportedly due to Israeli interdiction.
The Israeli Air Force has closed the Tehran-Beirut air resupply route: Iranian cargo has now been diverted to Latakia, Syria, with weapons then continuing by truck to Lebanon through border crossings that Israel’s air force has also been targeting.
For Israel, blocking the flow of Iranian weapons into Lebanon is essential to preventing Hezbollah from reconstituting its arsenal. But the cat-and-mouse game in the skies of the Levant is not a long-term solution, as long as Hezbollah controls Lebanon’s only civilian, commercial, international airport.
Breaking Hezbollah’s grip on the relevant arms of the Lebanese government is the only way to ensure Iran can no longer replenish Hezbollah’s arsenal.
Previously, Israel’s air interdiction had focused on Syria, which for years had been the key destination for Iranian weapons deliveries. Israeli precision strikes on Syrian runways and weapons warehouses led to the Iranian shift toward Beirut — especially after October 7, 2023, when Hezbollah joined Hamas in its onslaught against Israel’s civilian population.
The Iranian carrier Mahan Air — which the US Department of the Treasury has repeatedly sanctioned for transporting weapons, militias, and illicit procurement on Iran’s behalf — began flying into Beirut at least weekly.
With hostilities escalating from cross-border exchanges into a full-fledged conflict, Mahan flights have stopped going to Beirut, but continue to head into Latakia, Syria, alongside other carriers, including a cargo Boeing 747 operated by Fars Air Qeshm, a US sanctioned Iranian regime proxy of Mahan Air, previously involved, on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force, in the transfer of weaponry to Syria and other destinations — including, reportedly, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan — since 2017.
With Israel methodically hitting Hezbollah’s hidden weapons caches across Lebanon, the only way Iran can ensure Hezbollah can live to fight another day is to resume these deliveries. That is why, despite international airlines having cancelled all flights to Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International airport, Iranian carriers are scrambling to make it there.
Despite the trappings of state institutions formally running Lebanon’s transport and travel infrastructure — airports and ports authorities, airport security, customs, and a ministry of public transports — Hezbollah officials control or have heavily infiltrated them, thereby enabling Hezbollah’s activities rather than preventing them.
For years now, Hezbollah has suborned the airport to its needs: Drug shipments from Latin America go unchecked through security and customs, before they reach lucrative Middle East markets in exchange for a fee paid to the Hezbollah officials who clear the illicit merchandise. And weapons shipments have come in regularly from Iran, before being offloaded and stored nearby.
Hezbollah’s continuing grip on Beirut’s airport will sooner or later make the airport a target for Israeli action.
Washington and its allies can help remedy this situation.
First, Hezbollah officials implicated in turning Lebanon’s points of entry into smuggling machines should be sanctioned. Under President Trump, the US Department of the Treasury targeted Wafiq Safa, the man in charge of security at Beirut’s airport.
According to Treasury, Safa — the head of Hezbollah’s security apparatus — “exploited Lebanon’s ports and border crossings to smuggle contraband and facilitate travel on behalf of Hizballah, undermining the security and safety of the Lebanese people, while also draining valuable import duties and revenue away from the Lebanese government.” But that was five years ago. More pressure is needed, including on the Hezbollah-backed minister of public transports, Ali Hamieh.
The European Union spent 3.5 million euro to bolster Beirut’s airport security in 2020, and recently pledged another billion euro to help Lebanon’s fledgling economy and strengthen state institutions, including the improvement of border management and security — all after Lebanon’s airport chief had been sanctioned by the US.
Holding the Lebanese government responsible for failing to use European taxpayer funds for the purposes for which they were earmarked should become a first priority, making any future security aid conditional on removing any Hezbollah officials from the public transport and infrastructure sector.
Lebanon is at a crossroads. If its government can be convinced to degrade Hezbollah infiltration of its government institutions, such as its international airport, it stands a chance to get back on its feet. The alternative is that, having relinquished control over its international border crossings to Hezbollah and Iran, it will risk losing its only gateway to the world to IDF action. That would be a tragedy for Lebanon — but an inevitable casualty of a conflict for which Lebanon’s authorities have only themselves to blame.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan research institute in Washington, DC, focusing on foreign policy and national security. Follow him on X @eottolenghi
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Israel Agrees to Talks on Lebanon Border, to Free Five Lebanese, PM Office Says
An Israeli flag flies in Lebanon, near the Israel-Lebanon border, following the ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, as seen from Metula, northern Israel, Dec. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
Israel said on Tuesday it had agreed to hold talks to demarcate its border with Lebanon, adding it would release five Lebanese detainees held by the Israeli military in what it called a “gesture to the Lebanese president.”
A statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israel had agreed with Lebanon, the US, and France to establish working groups to discuss the demarcation line between the two countries.
Though Israel has largely withdrawn from southern Lebanon under a ceasefire deal agreed in November, its troops continue to hold five hilltop positions in the area with airstrikes in southern Lebanon citing what it described as Hezbollah activity.
The ceasefire deal ended more than a year of conflict between Israel‘s military and the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah that was playing out in parallel with the Gaza war.
The fighting peaked in a major Israeli air and ground campaign in southern Lebanon that left Hezbollah badly weakened, with most of its military command killed in Israeli strikes.
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UN Security Council to Meet Over Iran’s Growing Stockpile of Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium
Members of the Security Council cast a vote during a United Nations Security Council meeting on the 3rd anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at UN headquarters in New York, US, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
The United Nations Security Council will meet behind closed doors on Wednesday over Iran’s expansion of its stock of uranium close to weapons grade, diplomats said on Monday.
The meeting was requested by six of the council’s 15 members – France, Greece, Panama, South Korea, Britain, and the US.
They also want the council to discuss Iran’s obligation to provide the UN nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency – with “the information necessary to clarify outstanding issues related to undeclared nuclear material detected at multiple locations in Iran,” diplomats said.
Iran’s mission to the UN in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the planned meeting.
Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon. However, it is “dramatically” accelerating enrichment of uranium to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level, the IAEA has warned.
Western states say there is no need to enrich uranium to such a high level under any civilian program and that no other country has done so without producing nuclear bombs. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful.
Iran reached a deal in 2015 with Britain, Germany, France, the US, Russia, and China – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – that lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for restrictions on its nuclear program.
Washington quit the agreement in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, and Iran began moving away from its nuclear-related commitments.
Britain, France, and Germany have told the UN Security Council that they are ready – if needed – to trigger a so-called snap back of all international sanctions on Iran to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
They will lose the ability to take such action on Oct. 18 this year when the 2015 UN resolution on the deal expires. US President Donald Trump has directed his UN envoy to work with allies to snap back international sanctions and restrictions on Iran.
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Entire Families Killed in Syria’s Military Crackdown, UN Says
A man inspects a damaged car in Latakia, after hundreds were reportedly killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed President Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new Islamist rulers, Syria, March 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Haidar Mustafa
Entire families including women and children were killed in Syria’s coastal region as part of a series of sectarian killings by the army against an insurgency by Bashar al-Assad loyalists, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
Pressure has been growing on Syria’s Islamist-led government to investigate after reports by a war monitor of the killing of hundreds of civilians in villages where the majority of the population were members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
“In a number of extremely disturbing instances, entire families – including women, children, and individuals hors de combat – were killed, with predominantly Alawite cities and villages targeted in particular,” UN human rights office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said, using a French term for those incapable of fighting.
So far, the UN human rights office has documented the killing of 111 civilians and expects the real toll to be significantly higher, Al-Kheetan told a Geneva press briefing. Of those, 90 were men; 18 were women; and three were children, he added.
“Many of the cases documented were of summary executions. They appear to have been carried out on a sectarian basis,” Al-Kheetan told reporters. In some cases, men were shot dead in front of their families, he said, citing testimonies from survivors.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk welcomed an announcement by Syria’s Islamist-led government to create an accountability committee and called for those investigations to be prompt, thorough, independent, and impartial, the spokesperson added.
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