Israel’s envoy to UN demands Ban condemn Nasrallah threats

Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, has demanded that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemn threats by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to inflict nuclear attack-like casualties by bombing the city of Haifa in a future conflict.

“When a terror group threatens a country’s citizens, silence is unacceptable,” Danon wrote in a letter to Ban Thursday.

On Tuesday, Nasrallah insisted during a speech that while the Lebanese Shiite group wasn’t currently seeking war with Israel, it could defeat the Jewish state in a future conflict by targeting a large ammonia storage tank in Haifa.

Danon called Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed bolstered presence along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon a flagrant violation of UN Resolution 1701, which calls for the border zone to be free of armed personnel.

“Hezbollah’s dangerous military buildup, and its leaders’ murderous statements, demands a condemnation,” Dannon said, according to a statement from his office.

“Hezbollah has made southern Lebanon into a military fortress so that it can fire indiscriminately at Israel’s civilian population, making it a war crime twice over,” he said, referring to Resolution 1701.

Nasrallah’s speech on Tuesday sparked widespread consternation in Israel over his specific threat against the Haifa chemical plant, and drew promises from government officials that they were working to move the ammonia tank to southern Israel.

“This would be exactly as a nuclear bomb, and we can say that Lebanon today has a nuclear bomb, seeing as any rocket that might hit these tanks is capable of creating a nuclear bomb effect,” Nasrallah said, adding that Hezbollah, which has reportedly lost many of its men in the Syrian civil war, was continuing to boost its capabilities.

Hezbollah, which fought a blistering war with Israel in 2006, has not been designated as a terror group by the UN.