Many officials in Beirut say privately that much of the shipment was stolen, Reuters said...
According to an unsourced assessment publicized on Israel’s Channel 13 news last August, Hezbollah may have planned to use the ammonium nitrate stockpile against Israel in a “Third Lebanon War"....
In 2019
reports in Israel claimed that the Mossad had tipped off European intelligence agencies about Hezbollah storing caches of ammonium nitrate for use in bombs in London, Cyprus and elsewhere. The Channel 13 report noted that “the material that exploded in the port is not new to Nasrallah and Hezbollah.”
It detailed Hezbollah’s previous connections to ammonium nitrate, including incidents in Germany and the UK, both widely reported at the time, in which its agents were reportedly found with substantial quantities of the material. In
London in 2015, following a Mossad tip-off, British intelligence found four Hezbollah operatives with 3 tons of ammonium nitrate held in flour sacks, the TV report said, citing foreign reports. A similar process led to the discovery in
Germany of Hezbollah operatives with enough ammonium nitrate “to blow up a city,” the report said. Germany subsequently banned Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
